AOLgoogle "enhanced" methodology

what the heck is going on?

[steveb]

There are posts here about people liking or not liking the new aol/google/enhanced search results.

But I'm curious if anybody has been able to come up with a good theory about how on earth these results are generated. For my principal keywords the AOL results appear to be about 70% Google and 30% pure gibberish. A #15 Google search result will be about a #30 on AOL, while left field results appear for no google-based reason.

It's clearly an awful mess, which some folks obviously like because their results show well, if only by accident, but how can a person go about optimizing for AOL when AOL pays so little attention to Google after the first five results?

[Key_Master]

It's clearly an awful mess, which some folks obviously like because their results show well, if only by accident, but how can a person go about optimizing for AOL when AOL pays so little attention to Google after the first five results?

Maybe it's the other way around and not AOL's fault.

[aolsearch.aol.com...]

[search.netscape.com...]

[steveb]

aolsearch.aol.com delivers different results than search.aol.com

In any case I see Netscape delivering Google results but AOL not.

[Rugles]

You get proper Google results when using the AOL browser. I would think that most of the searches done at AOL.com are webmasters without AOL accounts checking their positions.

I would suggest that you just ignore the "enhanced by Google" results.