AOL Starts Its Research Engine
It seems like AOL is undergoing a major business change. While it plans to cut 5000 jobs, it’s quietly boosting its scientific research investment. In a recent announcement sent to a research mailing list, AOL states that it’s new business direction is “making its content and products freely available to all consumers”, and it’s inviting researchers in academia and industry to participate.
AOL Research, AOL’s research body, is making available large amount web search data to the research community.
- 20,000 hand labeled, classified queries
- 3.5 million web question/answer queries (who, what, where, when, etc.)
- Query streams for 500,000 users over 3 months (20 million queries)
- Query arrival rates for queuing analysis
- 2 million queries against US Government domains
Additional data that it plans to make available in the future includes “random samples of query time”, “concurrent query sets from Web, News and Audio/Video”.
update: Not too long after AOL’s announcement, on Aug. 3, 2006, Google announced that it will made available of 6 DVDs of search data used for public research and development. This set of data is the result of processing one trillion words from the Web.
update (2006-08-07): There seems to be some privacy concerns over the search data that AOL has released. The site linked in the above has been taken down. More discussions can be found here.
I have reasons to believe that AOL is making the right move this time by boosting its research investment. Many analysts believe that the new money is in the online advertising market. However, in order to attract and maintain a large user base, web sites must provide free and innovative services. Google and Yahoo! are the experts. While AOL is a late starter, but definitely it seems to have started right this time.
AOL has a key advantage that Google and Yahoo! don’t have. It’s the backing of Time Warner’s content business (movies, TV shows etc.). If AOL can create basic web services to function more or less like Yahoo! and Google, with its added contents, it’s very possible that more users will be attracted to visit AOL, consequently boosting its advertising business.
If AOL can play its card right this time, it may have the chance to compete the existing leaders in online advertising. In the next year, I see the new Internet players are Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Live.com, and possibly AOL.com.
