What's up with AOL?

[jilly]

AOL just updated this morning. I was under the impression that they used ODP data. I can tell you that most of the sites I searched for do not exist in the ODP database and AOL is very spammy in some keyword searches. Does anyone know what's going on?

Jill

[tedster]

Jilly,

Yep, something's up. Search on one kw sometimes returns zero results and sometimes returns thousands. So it's an update that's not complete.

BTW, AOL also includes Inktomi data to augment their ODP returns. reference [webmasterworld.com]

You can tell there's INK data when they include a "may contain obectionable material" disclaimer at the top.

I hope they're integrating the GoTo top three with this update -- that will be very interesting to watch.

[jilly]

Hmmm... I'm not sure I want the goto stuff in there, but I think that's what they may be working on. I lost some very high listings this time and got moved down - surprise - 3 spots from the top. :( Time will tell. I'm just kind of surprised at the number of returns with the same site and almost the same descriptions for some searches. That's definitely not ODP.

[seth_wilde]

"returns with the same site and almost the same descriptions"

Haven't got all the details worked out quite yet, but it appears as though the AOL is somehow crawling the ODP sites.

[jilly]

Seth:

I'd be very interested in knowing if that were the case. The sites that are coming up high in these searches reek of spam. I'm still listed pretty high and it doesn't appear as if my traffic is dropping. That's probably because the higher sites seem to have a lot of redirection and non-relevant stuff on their sites. Their loss my gain! Still I don't like to see the spammy returns. It doesn't seem right as there should be no spam in ODP - at least not in the categories I edit...;)

[seth_wilde]

It's not that there's spam in ODP, it's that their indexing other pages from sites that are listed in ODP.