Molly’s post about search engines and standards has inspired me to tell my standards evolution story, because it’s really all about AOL Search.
I worked on AOL Search for five years, from 1999 – 2004. In that time, it went from being “AOL Netfind”, powered by Excite and in a horrible frameset where we had very little control over anything to something built completely in-house powered by the ODP, to what you see today (powered by a bunch of in-house technology and incorporating results from all over the web, most noticably from Google).
I was the only person to touch the frontend code for that five years. I wrote the first in-house version of AOL Search in AOLPress, a WYSIWYG HTML Editor that started life as NaviPress. It was a glorious example of old school HTML. It was all uppercase tags, unquoted attributes, tables all over the place and non-breaking spaces. But, it was one of the first successful web products at AOL, and was a whole lot better than NetFind was.
I started noticing the web standards movement in, I think, 2000. Back then, I couldn’t do anything about it because we had to support Netscape 4.7 and all the other old school browsers. But, in 2000, I removed all the font tags from AOL Search and we started using CSS for text (which was all it was good for back then). Life continued… I started blogging in July of 2000, and in November of 2001, my blog went all CSS-y (Zeldman even wrote about it).
In 2002, it was time to break out of tables, and we did. I dropped all the tables, and put in a browser sniff to give Netscape 4 users a stinky old tabled header and footer. I didn’t have a DOCTYPE (because I was young and stupid), but we were table-less. This is when our business decided that speed was all-important. They really wanted us to get our load time under six seconds. I don’t remember why six seconds was the magic number, but it was. We still had several large banner ads on the site, and six seconds seemed like an impossible dream.
I went crazy in 2003. I was on a mission. I was the six second man. I was going to get us there, because dammit, I love a challenge. We started 2003 at about 14 seconds (measured by an internal tool, over a modem, using the AOL client, not perfect, but it was consistent). I dove into the standards, and pored over weblogs, forums and A List Apart, looking for anything that would help me get there. This is when I discovered semantic markup. I started trimming. In the spring, we hit 10 seconds. Then, I put in a standards-mode DOCTYPE, and, without changing anything else, we went from 10 to 8. We were close, and I smelled blood. So, I devised a test where I made a version of the product that didn’t have any ads on it at all. We tested it and it loaded in less than four seconds, according to the tool. Now I had my villain and the lobbying started. I won’t go into everything I had to go through to get those big ads taken off, and I never actually got them all removed, but I got the “bad” ones taken off, and we replaced them with sponsored links, first from Overture and then from Google.
In late 2003, we hit 6 seconds. I did a little dance and took a vacation. When I got back, I decided that I could hit four without too much more effort. I started trimming. Everything on the results page was meaningful. All the results were list items. We had headers for result sections. There was a place for everything, and everything in its place. I got better with CSS, wrote better selectors, and shed more meaningless markup and lots of bad CSS. We hit 4 seconds (and broke it for a little while… 3.78 seconds). In the spring of 2004, by our measurements, we were one second faster than Yahoo (and much faster than everyone else) and one second slower than Google. AOL Search, at that moment, was everything I wanted it to be. It was fast. It was standards-compliant (except for those stupid ampersands). It was accessible (at one point, we did all these tests with an internal tool, and we were more accessible than any other major search engine, and scored better than Accessify).
That’s when I moved on to other stuff. I couldn’t work on it after that. I’d done everything I could with it. In my mind, it was perfect. Changing anything would have broken my heart. I wrote another search app, built on the philosophy of the CSS Zen Garden that allowed products within AOL to create search products without writing any code – just configure, create your own CSS file, and go.
Now, I’m doing training and mentoring stuff. I tell other folks how to do this stuff. What did I learn from my five years on AOL Search? Everything. I learned everything. It was challenging, stressful and really scary at times, but I learned more than I would have if I had jumped around from project to project, never seeing the consequences of my choices. With AOL Search, I had a this huge high-profile product where every little change made a difference in the company’s bottom line. I had a platform for experimentation, and since I was the only one who touched that one part of it, I had almost complete control over how it was built. I got the blame when I messed up (and I did), and the credit when it worked (and it did, mostly). I got to see how making it faster made people use it more. When we got to six seconds, usage went through the roof.
Why tell the story? I don’t know. It’s important to me. It’s part of what’s driving me to push standards to the rest of AOL. It’s important because it makes for better products. It’s important because our users benefit. They don’t wait around for pages to download and can actually get on with using the product. We get consistency, and maintainability. It’s important to me because the process is repeatable. It’s possible to go from old school, inaccessible and slow to standards-based, accessible and fast. Today, it shouldn’t take you five years to do it. I was hamstrung by the browser environment at the time. You have no excuse. It’s never been a better time to work on the web, and it’s only going to get better. Get to it.