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.
