A Qwiki Snapshot Of AOL
November 05, 2010 at 15:04 PM EDT
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 It is amazing how a picture can say it all, even if it is outdated.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 sums up the perception of many people, and algorithms, out there when you mention AOL. (Qwiki relies completely on its algorithms to select images).