This is too funny not to post. The screen grab above comes from Qwiki, the visual search engine which came away with the top prize at our last TechCrunch Disrupt. Qwiki is still in private alpha , but it essentially assembles a visual narrative for millions of topics by pulling together images and text, which is read out loud by a friendly, female robo-voice.
When you search for “AOL” in Qwiki, it prominently features the slide above showing AOL’s precipitous decline in subscribers from 2001 to 2009. It is amazing how a picture can say it all, even if it is outdated. That slide pretty much sums up the perception of many people out there when you mention AOL. And algorithms too—Qwiki relies completely on its algorithms to select images.
Of course, AOL is trying to shake that past and move boldly into the future. Hell, it bought us, didn’t it? And, I must say, we are very happy with our new corporate overlords. In the past 30 days alone, referring traffic from AOL is up 7,948,666.67% (that is the actual number). May we have another?
Truth be told, the Qwiki entry on AOL could use some better images. Here is a better one to start with:
AOL is a global advertising-supported Web company, with display advertising network in the U.S., a substantial worldwide audience, and a suite of popular Web brands and products. The company’s strategy focuses on increasing the scale and sophistication of its advertising platform and growing the size and engagement of its global online audience through leading products and programming. History of Aol: AOL was founded in the early 1980’s as Control Video Corp, with an online service, Gameline, for the Atari 2600 console. ...
Qwiki is an industry leader in automated video production. Most recently, Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user’s camera roll into brief, beautiful movies to share. The company’s initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best Search and Reference application of 2011. After integrating this technology in the Bing Search...
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