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I think this is spot-on. If AOL serves up straight Google they will loose all but their most torpid users. AOL'ers that have a real thirst for exploring over the AOL horizon may already have switched to using Google. AOL may actually hope to recapture some of them. I can't blame AOL for that - they almost have to differentiate themselves.
vitaplease: I suspect you are right that many AOL'ers and many Americans will turn inward. It is a shame, but AOL caters to that market anyway.
Even though this is a beta, I suspect the default will remain at US hosted sites just to make things different. Most users will not know the difference.
The wording "Enhanced by Google" was carefully chosen for a reason. It should warn us not to expect pure Google results from the product.
Had AOL staff a look at this forum?
I have another website that is very specific to a certain area here in New York. The only people that would EVER find this website useful are people who live in New York. The only people who would search for a site like this are New Yorkers. However, I host it with a company located in Canada which means (according to these results) anytime anyone in New York searches for something related to this site, this site would never come up. Luckily though, when someone in Canada searches, they will probably be able to find this site. Now that's quality huh?
Again, I agree that this is not even beta yet, but in case this does become the official results, I want Google/AOL to know exactly how bad it is, so hopefully something gets done about it.
If the Beta sticks, I'll be quite happy! It appears that this board has quite a few webmasters from the UK. That's fine, but I am one webmaster from the US that would stand to benefit. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
right on spot! Never underestimate our power!
Still I am glad to have vented my concerns..;)
Yep - pure Google
Mat, not quite, a little change in ranking here and there (irrespective of non-clustering) and those differences are not equal to any of the www1/2/3 googles.
Shows non-Us sites now as well.
Although sometimes, searching for foreign words gives no results, just pressing refresh several times does eventually reveal them. (at least at this moment).
pretty poor clustering on some SERP's
that makes it interesting, it could give a peek at how well your third, fourth and fifth page for that search query are placed should normal Google have allowed multiple listings..
Showing the the top six listings for your treasured search query, could mean that that your site is pretty topical and themed for that subject (and I keep on dreaming ;) )
Why did Google allow such a pre-release?
They wanted some fun tracking down the url's and keytargeted search phrases of the members here.
All part of the great conspiracy theory - Oliver Stone hasn't seen nothin.
I can understand having local results for aol.co.uk , aol.de and having the option to search the rest of 'the web'
But putting the restriction on non US sites on AOL's .COM site is ridiculous - why not have a USA site - aol.us perhaps
A .com name by no means a US site and having just US results on such would be silly!
We operate an e-commerce website from Canada and 95% of our customers are in the US.
Almost all those factors you cited as being a reason to like this new format, would easily apply to us.
We accept US credit cards for payment (through a US bank), shipping times are the same, our 800 numbers work in the US, you are legally protected, many of the goods we sell are made in the USA. Yet we are excluded from the SE.
Plus we have a "Free Trade" agreement with your country.
To be excluded is an insult, and we will just put up doorway pages (optimized to the max)on a US based server to get around this censorship.
If you do not find what you are looking for in one engine, you switch to the next one. Do not give users the opportunity to switch.
I am glad that they have come to their senses. :)
If AOL really want a US only search they should offer it as an option... not block their customers from seeing the real WORLD Wide Web.
We are an Ecommerce Company Physically located in the USA with our server located in Canada. The DomainName is a .com . As aof yesterday this thread had scared out of my wits. To think the AOL would filter results this way is unheard of. Then I tried it. As of yesterday we were also not in the AOL index. However as of this morning our site is listed in the serps I have done.
I have also noted that when I do a serp from aolsearch.aol.com it now says enhanced by google on the regular serps.
Anyone else seeing this?
So much for all that complaining.
I knew I would be bashed for supporting US results. I've noticed that getting area specific results has been a topic elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if this type of thing becomes more common. We already know that Google is pursuing the ability to do this. In Atlanta, many of my points on my last post would apply to Canadian goods as well. I love Canada, but when I need something in a hurry, I would rather it be shipped from a closer source. Sending and receiving shipments regularly from all over the US and Canada, I can personally say that shipping is more expensive and takes longer. Local search results would have their merit even in the case of Canada. Conversely, when customers call from Canada to purchase product we often refer them to a Canadian distributor. It would be nice if the search engine did this for us.
AOL search Rocks.
Whew... I thought it was just me. I've got a couple of Top 10 of Ten listings, and even one Top Twelve of Twelve.
I don't expect it to last, but its A Rush nevertheless. :)
even one Top Twelve of Twelve.
Wow nice one! Best I've got so far is top 7. I agree that it probably won't last, looks like it is picking up all internal pages that would naturally be ranked higher than the next result.
Could be good fun if it does stay - open to all sorts of abuse and interesting research :)
[edited by: olias at 7:17 pm (utc) on July 24, 2002]
For a line we carry we are the top 70, the top 70.
Gotta go and do a happy dance.
WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOO
For a target 3 word phrase, my site and another site have over half of the top 30 positions.
I wonder how long it will stay like this, with the URL clustering off?
I notice that when you type in a company name or brand name, you often get the top 5-10 results all from the same site. Not necessarily on all searches, but enough to say that this is quite different from Google.
From what I'm seeing, the "extra" results are appearing in the exact same order they would if one used the "More results from" link to see all the results from a domain. AOL's results are very Googlish, just with less clustering.
By the way, why is everyone is so surprised that AOL would consider filtering out non-U.S. sites? The Inktomi-version of their search always filtered out a lot of non-English sites in my test searches.
[www3.google.com...]
[search.aol.com...]
