AOL, ESPN, Others Seek to Bypass Google with Address Bar Searching

Above: AOL's relaunched Love.com builds curated, vertical sites all on the fly from the address bar. 

For years, when consumers wanted to find specific information they would go to a major vertical site like ESPN.com and execute a search. Google's growth, however, is changing the game. 

Today when consumers turn to Google to say, search for say Shaq, there's a ton competition their attention. It's coming from everywhere - Twitter, Google News embedded links, SEO-optimized brand sites, news sites and more. This doesn't bode well for major media companies that have built vast databases of content.

Several sites, however, are now looking to snatch their traffic back from Google by letting consumers easily execute searches from and curate content on the fly, all from the address bar. Three such sites include AOL's newly relaunched Love.com, ESPN and IceRocket. The goal is to make it easy to search from the address bar by tacking on a word to the domain.

Last week, AOL quietly launched an alpha of Love.com - a portal to topical content from around the web. Now, of course, you can search directly on the home page for any topic you want to track. AOL will build a site that curates content from you from across the web. However, the beauty of Love.com is that you can enter any term as a sub-domain and Love.com will build a site for you on the fly - even if it doesn't exist. For example, try shaq.love.com or twitter.love.com or even steve-rubel.love.com. The pages pull up news stories, YouTube videos, tweets and more.

According to an AOL spokesman, this is part of the company's effort to become an aggregator of content - a strategy that some feel is the future of media. Currently, there are 100,000 love.com sites live. AOL has plans to launch 250,000 in the next few weeks. The technology is being powered by Relegance, which they acquired in 2006, and is rolling out across its Mediaglow brands.

ESPN, meanwhile, now has an ad campaign running on air that encourages sports fans to search by adding a term at the end of their domain. The ad showcases that searching for former NFL star and now commentator Bob Golic (ESPN.com/bobgolic) turns up different results than for Serbian ping pong sensation Biba Golic (ESPN.com/bibagolic). The technology works nicely for pretty much any team or star - e.g. ESPN.com/yankees.

IceRocket's Big Buzz social search feature, which I am a fan of, also offers similar URL-based searches,according to founder Blake Rhodes. Simply add any su-bdomain and it will pul together a curated search. For example, try advertising.icerocket.com or easter.icerocket.com and IceRocket will build a nice site that includes blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and more.

I suspect that Google will easily copy this feature very soon. They have the technology and I am sure don't want to see vertical sites grab any of their traffic, no matter how small. Still, this is a smart approach and I am sure that we will see more of it not just on media sites but in social networks (via redirects) and on corporate and brand sites too.

Comments

[Norbert Mayer-Wittmann]

I predict Love.COM will becom a top 100 site within 1 year (if they manage it well) and a top 1000 site within a year (if they manage it poorly.

See also: http://gaggle.info/miscellaneous/articles/wisdom-of-the-language

:) nmw

[Daniel Tunkelang]

It's a nice move. But I think what would be an even stronger move is for major vertical sites to promote browser plug-ins that automatically redirect appropriate searches to their sites, e.g., ESPN for sports teams. Redirect is probably too strong, but perhaps promotion is enough. Basically, allow users to implement their own browser-controlled "preferred sites" independently of Google et al.

[Norbert Mayer-Wittmann]

Presently http://poems.love.com lists a story titled "Barkowitz appointed financial aid dean" -- not exactly awe-inspiring.

:S nmw

[Jason]

In the end, love.com just another (mediocre) search engine with nice-looking URLs.

[Norbert Mayer-Wittmann]

It's not even a search engine (better yet would be actual community moderation). I would put it on the level of "robolinks" ( see also http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/david-carr-the-reckoning-is-at-hand-for-free-content :)

[Fred H Schlegel]

" It's coming from everywhere - Twitter, Google News embedded links, SEO-optimized brand sites, news sites and more." - That is the problem many of us are waiting to have solved. While google provides the best of class for broad search, currently it is difficult to narrow things down to the universe I feel like trusting. Maybe I would be satisfied with a sports search via ESPN, but I'm guessing over time I would want it to hit a number of trusted content providers. This still leaves Google in the drivers seat, although with significant tweaks.

[haywood]

actually the love.com sites are created by batch processing keyword searches algorithmically, but the lists are curated by actual people. you won't get everything in the world, but 100,000 items sure is a lot expecially when actually relevant. 250,000 even more powerful considering they are based on study of real current trends or historically strong data.

the poems example is a fluke, i have seen others. sometimes there may be a mention of a specific item in a story that gets parsed, and for some reason it's thought of as being relevant. perhaps a mix of language and specific keywords throwing the system off for an article. hard to say "not exactly inspiring" when 9 out of 10 results are solid. also, as a human reading it, i can instantly tell it's off on that one.

[Fraser]

Well the idea isn't exactly new. Newsvine.com having been doing this for over 3 years.

I'm still going to be using google.

[Craig McGinty]

I'm no great code junkie but looking at the source code of this page:

http://t.love.com/203548952

I wouldn't be too happy if I was Barry Graubart.

I have a feeling that the rise of framed pages like this is going to have a real impact on search and publishers.

Someone with a little more coding experience might want to take a look in a similar way to the way the Digg bar was recently looked over:

http://www.aodmarketing.com/social-media/the-digg-toolbar-exposed-whats-in-the-code/

[Mobile Marketing]

Good move. It's almost impossible to get onto the 1st three pages of google so why not.

[Atul Chatterjee]

How this move of AOL etc is going to change searches is unclear. Google can always imitate the move. For myself I have moved away from Google when I am researching instead use Clusty.com.But sure the search of subdomains is going to throw up a lot more information.