America Online 2009 Annual Report Download - page 10

Table of Contents
• MapQuest, which is a leading online mapping and directions service;
• Local Entertainment Guides (including City's Best); and
• Local Directories (including AOL Yellow Pages).
Consumer Applications
We offer a powerful suite of consumer applications, including communications products and services. Our e-mail and instant messaging products and
services provide us with the ability to reach millions of consumers globally. Our goal is to increase the reach and engagement of our communications
offerings on multiple platforms and digital devices (including on smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Android-based devices). Accordingly, we
seek to continue to develop and enhance the functionality of our communications offerings, including through user interface improvements and integrations
with other networks and services.
Our consumer applications offerings include the following:
• AOL Mail, which is one of the most popular e-mail services in the United States;
• AIM, which is a leading instant messaging service in the United States;
• a suite of mobile offerings which extend our content, products and services to a range of digital devices;
• a variety of toolbars (browser plug-ins) that gives consumers persistent, easy access to content and search;
• Lifestream, which provides consumers an easy way to aggregate updates from different social networks to which they belong; and
• ICQ, which is an instant messaging service that has a strong international presence.
We are continually looking to enhance our communications offerings. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2009, we launched a simpler, more intuitive
user interface for AOL Mail. We also believe there are long-term opportunities to distribute content, products and advertising through our communications
offerings, enabling us to generate increased advertising revenue.
Search and Contextual
We offer AOL Search on AOL Properties. We provide our consumers with a general, Internet-based search experience that utilizes Google's organic
web search results and additional links on the search results page that showcase contextually relevant AOL and third-party content and information, as well as
provide a variety of search-related features (such as suggesting related searches to help users further refine their search queries). We also provide our
consumers with relevant paid text-based search advertising through our relationship with Google, in which we provide consumers sponsored link ads in
response to their search queries.
We also offer our own proprietary video (Truveo) and news (Relegence) search services. We believe Truveo is the most comprehensive video search
engine in the world. Truveo's functionality enables consumers to enter search terms to discover publicly available online videos and receive search results that
include links to each video's host site and thumbnail-sized images to help consumers refine their search queries for relevant videos. The Relegence news
search service acquires information on a real-time basis from public and private information sources, including news wires, websites, regulatory feeds and
corporate sources, and indexes this information on a proprietary platform to enable the use of relevant, targeted news feeds across AOL Properties. In
addition, we offer vertical search services (i.e., search within a specific content category) and mobile search services on AOL Properties.
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