| What’s old is new again — AOL keywords! Here’s an article from 2010 talking about AOL keywords at the turn of the millennium: How many of you remember watching TV about a decade ago, and seeing commercials for large, well-known companies (and I mean really large ones—say, for example, Proctor & Gamble) and hearing “visit us on the world wide web at www.tidedetergent.com, or type in AOL Keyword: ‘laundry‘”? I was thinking about this the other day… AOL was way ahead of the curve on this. They were so far ahead of the curve that it didn’t catch on. I know some people just slightly younger than me might say “AOL? Who’s that?” But the fact is, AOL was really a cutting-edge company in the dot-com era. I suppose in one sense, you can’t even call them a dot-com company, cause they provided the framework for the dot-coms without really being one themselves. (Plus they’re still around!) In a way, they actually ushered in the internet age, and survived. Funny thought. But here’s what I’ve been thinking about… keywords were an idea so brilliant, we just accept them as a fact of life today. But at the time, AOL was the only one even thinking like that. I never knew what their policy was on how they assigned different keywords to different companies [does anyone know? was it auction-style? or just first-come-first-serve?], but I do know that they were attempting to make our online search efforts easier by coming up with simple, streamlined, logical one or two-word keywords that we could type into a special box in the AOL browser and, Voila! We would end up at exactly the most logical website for that type of word. http://www.ronstauffer.com/blog/remember-aol-keywords/ |