I originally sent this post simply as an email to friends and former colleagues. I was encouraged to post it for posterity, so here it is. 

John McKinley recently posted on his blog about AOL Search - it’s a positive view of the progress made over the last several years, and the fact that it largely went unnoticed in the market. 

It seems that the story is that “we did a lot with a little, and made some positive gains though few noticed.“ That story works for me in retrospect, but I also think a view of what it was like inside will provide a view to the future of search.

The team believed and many of us still passionately believe that delivering actual content rather than just links to content is a more satisfying and valuable experience. Research, business intelligence and revenue supports the fact that it’s a winning proposition. Full stop.

AOL Search pioneered a database-driven, Widget-driven search capability, one that offered content rather than links to content. It started 6 years ago with “starship” and grew into FullView. More than a veneer, it was a powerful, sophisticated semantic web platform. Web results were a simple modular part that could have been replaced at any time (given the right acquisition, etc.).

This experience had the potential to be a top 3 market player had there been a moderate amount of marketing and branding effort beginning in about 2003. AOL was not in the position/of the mind to do it. Understandably, there were many other projects drawing the focus of the company.

In retrospect we can think that Google’s ability to solidify the market around a “blue links” model was quite possibly unstoppable. It wasn’t always so, and I don’t think it will last forever. Users will gravitate to the more valuable, useful, “saves me time” experiences. ASK is on the right track to be the innovative counterbalance to the links-only experience. I hope Jim Lanzone and his folks keep it up.

The operative question is what could have been done differently in order to deliver a different fate for AOL.

Simple answer: reinvest a moderate portion of the vast margin into growing the business. It never happened.

So, after a half-decade of underinvestment, AOL had a choice of what to do with the property.

It was the same old question: Invest and build a brand - get behind the opportunity to be a player in search - which will be an (ever more) expensive battle and will have to become the company’s primary or secondary focus, or minimalize, enjoy the margins and a great partnership with Google and count the revenues.

I applaud the Falco/Grant/Cahall team for finally stepping up to the decision that had gone long-unmade. I am disappointed at the outcome, but not sure, given the years of underinvestment, that it wasn’t inevitable.

G