It appears that AOL has decided to build a Mobile Web index for its mobile search engine. It used to have only regular Web pages, and now allows you to find mobile friendly sites (coded in WML, XHTML, etc).

Just like Yahoo! OneSearch, results from the Mobile Web index are displayed right below traditional web results, see an example here (3 Mobile Web links against 6 for web results).

AOL is using Google to serve Web results, but they have built their own technology to index mobile sites. It’s good to see this move from AOL, they have decided to not just rely on transcoded web pages and allow users to easily find mobile friendly sites.

I find the relevance of mobile web results to be quite good, I’ve ran a few tests and quite frankly it does seem more relevant than Google Mobile…

I was unable to find information on the bot they use to crawl mobile sites, or if it was possible to submit your mobile site for inclusion on their index, so I’m hoping to find more details soon.
I hope Microsoft’s Live Search for mobile will do the same: Google, Yahoo, and AOL all have mobile web indices now, so Microsoft needs to play catch-up in this area.