Innovation is not always necessary to create a good product. Sometimes, all it takes is the right combination of existing products to create a new outstanding product. That is what AOL is looking to do, and from what it sounds like, they just might succeed. They will be taking the best pieces of what other search engines are doing, and combining them all into one. As Inside Google says, AOL will have "Google results, Yahoo focus, Vivisimo clustering, Copernic desktop search, Jeeves-style answers, saved search history." Rather than recreating the wheel, AOL will be partnering with various companies to provide this new search format. They will be doing one thing on their own, however, that is interesting to note. John Battelle explains "they have 60 full time employees creating edited 'snapshots' which respond to what AOL Search chief Gerry Campbell says are 20% of all queries. That's 2.5 million snapshots preloaded, so when you type in a popular query, you get an 'answer, not just a list of results.'"
Check out Inside Google and John Battelle for more information on this move by AOL.