AOL News More Popular Than Google News and Topix Combined
Search Engine Watch published an interesting overview by Greg Jarboe of the popularity of AOL News and how it has quickly become a major news search engine, second to only Yahoo News. Nielsen//NetRatings reported that in July 2005, only one month after its relaunch, AOL News had a unique audience of 16.5 million users. The audience of AOL News is over twice the size of Google News and 6.8 times larger than Topix.net.
So, given its audience why doesn’t AOL News get as much play in the search engine coverage field as Google, Yahoo, or Topix.net? Could be because it is old school AOL, which is about as exciting to write about as Prodigy or Compuserve News. And wait a second, isn’t AOL just a clone of Google News?
Greg explains. While AOL Search is still powered by Google, AOL News is not a clone of Google News. It includes an AOL Newsroom section, which contains articles that have been hand-picked and enhanced by AOL News Editors to include multimedia content – including video, audio or photos – as well as links to other relevant content on AOL and the Web.
AOL News also includes a Top Headlines section, which contains articles from its extensive database of news sources. AOL News also includes sections for Business News, Entertainment News, and Sports News.
By the way, Topix.net is also an AOL partner, providing local news stories in the AOL Local Search service. Funny that AOL is harnessing the power of Google News and Topix.net to create its own advanced offerings. Speaking of Topix.net, haven’t heard from them in a while. Hey Chris Tolles, if anything new is happening with Topix.net please send us an email.
