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Let's not panic and let it settle, but record observations. Now, where's that coffee pot.
In summary:
All but US-hosted is missing.
The results have no clustering.
Anything else?
Some US-hosted is missing; #8 (out of 300k) in Google, but nowhere to be found on AOL. This serp is wwaaaaay off the mark, it's so bad that I'm certain that there have to be alarm bells going off at AOL and Google. I'll wait a week and see what hashes out before I start worrying.
AOL has been doing this pre-Google too... I think it looks OK if you have good eyesight. On first read, though, I thought you were talking about someting else: I'm seeing the letters "br" popping up occasionally in my snippet descriptions where there is no break tag on the site. So, "if you don't find" on the site is showing up as "if you dontbr find."
On one search phrase, the US-hosted German-meta-description graphics index page (an .org) of a main competitor is not listed (although it is at Nr1 in Google.com) but the English-language subsidiary page is listed lower down.
We need someone from aol like Googleguy to set us straight before we get too worked up.
Is there an "aolguy" reading this thread?
Is this perhaps what AOL thinks that its customer base actually wants?
I can see the attraction in a way - there is little point serving up straight Google results, otherwise they may suffer the same problems as Yahoo; users migrate to Google. By providing a very filtered set of results, AOL is offering something different. I presume that they know their market pretty well, and feel that their users are happier in a US comfort blanket.
With all that's recently happened there, I expect most AOL people will be reading the employment classifieds instead of this forum.
Is anybody happy with these results?
Im happy with the results... Just glad to be strong in AOL. Previous attemps at paid inclusion from Inktomi have not paid off. No traffic from this site, and little from the co.uk site over the past month or so.
The results are different from what I have seen before.. could they be a preview of this months update?
on the lines of www, www2, www3 ?
That feels much better....... aaahhhhhhhh... good stuff.
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Now we've done it! :)
This is similar to what I saw last July 8 :) which I started a thread about it [webmasterworld.com...]
Now I know I was not imagining things...he he he he
I had a look at what the "Featured Results from Google" means and here is the reason (from Netscape "Matching Results" - About This):
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Matching Results: Our web results are a blend of some of the best content available from AOL Time Warner's Web Properties, such as CNN and Time, and the World Wide Web. Netscape Search results contain links that are hand-picked by our research staff, that are articles and stories from some of the best online news and magazine sources available, and that are provided by Google, one of the most respected search engines on the Web. We organize and rank the results in the following manner:
Our knowledgeable research staff selects the most relevant links to display first.
Targeted news and magazine articles from top publications like Time, People and CNN will display next.
Web pages and links from the entire web universe appear following the above items and make up the bulk of matching results.
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If the results are the best they have... I would sell any AOL share if I had one!
Maybe they want to spice up the report by annonuncing "that aolsearch is using google as the search provider from today which will enhance both the user experience and the stickiness of the aol environment".
