Google To Purchase Stake In AOL For $1 Billion

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 16, 2005 @09:14AM from the that-is-a-lot-of-free-cds dept.

Lord Haha writes "It appears that Google may be on the verge of purchasing a 5% stake in AOL." From the article: "A tie-up with Google would make sense. Time Warner has been losing out online to rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo. For its part, Google may be interested in getting access to AOL's e-mail and instant messaging service. It would strengthen Google's hand against rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, who have well-established webmail and instant messaging services. Google is a relative newcomer to this area with Gmail and Googletalk." More commentary on News.com. Big change from just a few days ago.

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favored placement for aol? by slizz · 2005-12-16 09:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

from a nytimes article on the subject: "Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before."

i dont know if this means that google will be changing search results, but if it does, this is a pretty drastic philosophy change, and something that seems to bode extremely negatively for googles future