Comments on: AOL is Now Selling Local 10 Pack Spots

By: Richard Rosen

Richard Rosen — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:22:13 +0000

Mike – I noticed that each listing has a toll free number. I suspect these are YPC / Ingenio ppcall ads. If you search the number and its a tracking number or used for ppcall, it wont turn up on the company’s web site, or in other usual places. I searched a few of these toll free numbers and there were several pages, but they all looked like YPC syndicated listings. I agree the results offer a poor experience for the searching consumer.

By: Earlpearl

Earlpearl — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:40:42 +0000

My experience with AOL is simply that the traffic is pitifully small. When one realizes that direct traffic into a Local version of aol.com is a tiny percentage of AOL traffic…it suggests that traffic in that venue will be infitesmially small.

OTOH; In light of a multitude of technical and spam problems w/the other larger engines, the difficulties in getting a reliable version of Local/Maps…possibly a pay for the freight listing is a reasonable alternative. It should be done in a way though..that at least the businesses are ONLY local.

At least that would provide a reliable source of local contacts….if not one that is based on some kind of “hopefully” logical algo.

In light of the small volume of traffic its not the biggest problem out there.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:49:28 +0000

Miriam

I agree that the results are not ideal but I see several issues for a company like AOL:

1)Is paid any worse than distance from the centroid as the criteria for returning results?

2)Developing something more than distance from the centroid as the logic requires investment. What should a second tier search engine do to rationalize their development costs?

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:12:45 +0000

The engines already have PPC results for this. I, for one, would like to see Local kept algorithmic rather than monetary. There’s more democracy in it than capitalism, and I prefer it that way.

By: Cathy

Cathy — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:44:02 +0000

The AOL results look like mirrors of YellowPages.com results for the same categories. Apparently, they have outsourced their Local Search entirely or nearly entirely.

IYPs have long sold local listings to the highest bidders and have fee schedules and placement options which favor national buyers over locals. It’s not surprising that small town results would be dominated by national companies.

AOL marks the Paid search ads as ‘sponsored’ in the top and bottom portions of the Local Search pages, but doesn’t disclosed the ‘local’ results as paid/sponsored, too. As a user, I want to clearly be shown the difference between paid placements and natural search results and here, AOL clearly fails.