AOL eyes personal search

America Online Inc.'s (AOL) plans to improve and expand its search offerings include moving into personalized search, said Gerry Campbell, vice president and general manager of AOL Search.

"We're very focused on search as a company," Campbell said. "We're moving very aggressively in defining new ways for people to search, interact with and store information. It's a gigantic part of the company's focus. There's lots more to come."

One logical area for AOL to move towards in search is personalization, or giving users the capability to customize their search activities, save queries and manage, manipulate and store results, he said. "Personalization is on the horizon. That's a given," he said.

At this stage in the game, it's clear personal search is an interesting space, but it has yet to be proven if it's truly useful for users, Campbell said. While recognizing that competitors such as Yahoo Inc., A9.com Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc. have made strong moves in personal search recently, Campbell said users can expect AOL to follow suit "in a few months."

"There still has to be some proof as to whether personalizing search is hype," he said. "It's definitely interesting but it still bears proof to see whether it's actually useful, but we're charging after it."

Another area that Dulles, Virginia-based AOL is looking to extend search is towards its AIM instant messaging service. "We're innovating in every way you can imagine with respect to search," he said. "We're leaders in the instant messaging market and there should be some significant offerings there" in the future.

AOL is also working to further integrate into its overall search experience the multimedia search capabilities it acquired when it bought the company Singingfish in November 2003 , Campbell said. "We've done a very simple integration just to get moving. We're applying that technology internally so that we can get a more seamless integration of audio and video search results."

Although AOL has been quiet on the wireless search front, an area in which competitors Yahoo and Google Inc. have made moves recently, it is a segment AOL is paying close attention to, he said. "We don't have anything out in the (wireless search) market yet, but that belies the amount of concentration that we have on it as a company," Campbell said. "You can expect us to have the amount of activity (in wireless search) that is commensurate with a company our size."

The technical capabilities to tap search engines via a mobile device, such as a cell phone, have existed at least since the late 1990s, but the problem has been a lack of consumer demand, Campbell said. "There is still time to get this right. What's going to crack it is someone coming up with a completely new and fantastic experience that people can't live without," he said. "There's an opportunity to create the wireless killer app when it comes to looking for information."