According to Greg Linden, AOL Research has been shutdown after the massive search data leak and the user privacy concern that it presented.
After only a month of existence, the AOL Research website has been closed.
The site had a nice list of publications and was aimed to allow researchers to share their ideas with others and help people understand search engines better. Too bad it didn’t last long…
If you have children and ever tried to use a search engine with them in order to find help for their homework, you probably realized that it wasn’t always easy to find relevant results.
AOL recently released StudyBuddy.com a search engine that helps schoolchildren find useful resources and information.
Note that the domain is actually homework-help.aol.com: AOL’s trying to avoid the sandbox by using a subdomain and also keywords in the url 🙂
In this article from Seattle PI, you can read:
June Herold, AOL’s vice president for education and consumer services, said StudyBuddy was a response to complaints that because regular search engines have to cater to so many needs, results aren’t as useful for homework.
Because the results are pre-screened by teachers and librarians, Study Buddy provides only useful videos, articles, links to websites, or even games.
It’s a really nice move from AOL, I believe this is the only search engine of that kind on the web.