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Google Counters AOL Deal Speculation
arrrrg writes "Google has responded to speculation of biased search results and flashy banner ads arriving in the wake of their recent $1 Billion deal with AOL. On their official blog, they deny that users will see any negative changes. In particular they maintain that search results will remain unbiased and the site will remain free of banner ads." From the post: "Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say 'all the world's information,' this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content."
Yea, a lot of people would pay 1 billion dollars just to look at AOL's content. OMGWTFLOLOLROFLCOPTERS
Jeez, why didn't they just use one of the damn free cds?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Our goal is to organize^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontrol all of the world's information.
We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content."
No need to pay 1B for that, eh?
Can we atlease overlook all of the AOL popup ads? I can't believe that people actually paid for AOL. As far as I'm concerned all they did was pay for popup ads and under par internet service. If it was for the instant messenger, you could get that for free.
Man, you'd have to PAY me a billion dollars to work with AOL "webmasters". A lot of these people still thing AOL=The Internet.
- There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
Will the same be true for all the hundreds of thousands of sites in Google's ad display network?
Google achieved much through its innovation in text advertising. It proved that relevance is way more effective than blinking and moving graphics.
But now my local Google rep tells me Google accepts graphical banner content including Macromedia Flash format.
They're making some sort of guarantees about their own Google web site in TFA, but what about all their affiliate relays? Will Google allow customers to flood those with annoying graphical ads?
That could take eons. A lofty goal, but a respectable one at that.
After organizing all the world's information, you may just wish that you hadn't.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I wonder how much of that Billion dollars was spent for AOL content compared to Time Warner content...perhaps this is a way of sweetening the pot for their lyric database, movie database, news service and video archives.
Walk with Music;
Dude, seeing AOL content IS a negative change :(
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
...when they say they "want to organize the world's data, including AOL's." Doesn't Google already crawl and catalog sites on AOL or created by AOL subscribers? Or are they talking about things like multimedia content that is only available to AOL users? I was under the impression that internet content served by AOL worked just like any other site on the internet. Does AOL currently block Google from cataloging/caching all content served by AOL via robots.txt or other methods? I am not an AOL subscriber so if someone out there could share with the rest of the class, it would be appreciated.
If they start pushing animated gifs and swf.
Maybe I will block them, even if they use just logos for the ads.
Well of course, because Sally from Topeka's Brown Betty recipe, the weight of Susie from Hackensack's new baby boy, the measurements of Tony from Jersey City's new boss rims and Jennifer from Atlanta's belief that Britney Spears is "so cool and sexy" is information we all can't do without.
Organize these under "who gives a shit." Way to go, Google.
I hope they do indeed not change anything. They will however see any change as a good thing, like they first took away the good interface from dejanews and now turned of quoting by default in google groups and thus raping everybody that is NOT using google for Usenet to read and/or post.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Since very few folks will RTFA, here's the text in its entirety
The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up.
- Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner's page ranks high, it's because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us.
- Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say "all the world's information," this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content.
- AOL will receive a credit towards advertising purchased through Google's ad program. You might wonder if this will affect the ad auction. It won't. We don't offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners.
- We have a service called "onebox" for which we provide some additional links separate from ads (sponsored links) and search results. (Try searching on [new york transit strike] and look for the news section.) AOL and its products have always been a part of onebox, along with many other providers, and will continue to be.
- There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.
We're looking forward to what AOL can help us do for you, and believe that our new agreement with them will only create a better experience for you in 2006 and beyond -- one where you can continue to trust that we're giving you a result because it's the best one we can possibly provide.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
All your base are belong to us.
I'm glad that this is the first comment, seriously. That quote in the article sounds like google thinks we must have zero business sense.
I mean, if true, that's one LARGE consulting fee. Defense contractors would probably even gawk and say "that's a lot of money!"
What about google's collaboration with china's government?
Does "all the world's information" includes information about human rights, liberty and all this stuff?
The problem is the have a built in structural conflict of interest.
They do well when AOL does.
Even though it seems a stretch, these structural types of conflict of interest can be surprisingly powerful.
Give it five years. At some point, instead of trying to pick the best choices for onebox with the goal of it being the best for the user, they will pick an AOL option, and rationalize it will be the best for the user. It's a subtle difference, but almost guaranteed.
We also see from lobbying in the political realm, that access means a TON. Just getting alot more overlap with Google will let AOL really tune into what they are going to be doing in a way that others won't be able to.
Be interesting to see how this unfolds. Feels very business driven, and even there not sure I buy it. If you have to pay $1b to sell your ads on someone elses site, you're not really selling them. Better to just adjust the cut they get until they and more people everywhere cary them.
But of course, it is Google...they could not possibly be lying, can they? I am really concerned about this. Not the fact that they have all this power, but more the fact that nobody seems to see any problem with it. "Because they do no evil". They still are a company, a big one, and companies (espacially big ones) are more or less meant to be evil. Why would Google be an exception? They did, after all, buy a big chunk of stock in a comonly known as evil one...!
Uh right, because these high-paid webmasters at AOL have no idea what a metatag is? Do they really need to be spoon-fed by a Google technician to brief them on the latest breakthroughs in web design technology since 1990?
In other MSFT/GOOG news: Microsoft is going to provide all the search technology for Google in China. It seems that Google is buddying up to all of the Slashdotters favorite companies!
Until the entire planet is indexed. They have the capital and unlimited resources available to make it happen.
Aside from stopping MS from getting AOL google gets a 5% stake in AOL. They are buying stock, that stock has value. At some point in the future they can sell that stock (probably not right away due to contract agreements) and get money back.
Google no more gave up 1 Billion dollars than you give up money when you put it in you 401k. Sure Google likely paid more than the AOL percent was worth in return for additional contractual assurances (will use Google ads, won't do blah with MS etc..) but not the whole 1 billion. Only the difference between the true value of that stake and the amount they paid.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
One billion dollars, just to show AOL how to use robots.txt!
Hell, they could have paid me five hundred million and I would have done it for them for half price!
The most important information for a company such as Google is not from any information stores that Google will display publicly in a search response. It isn't from databases or PDFs or HTML files or any of the like.
In my opinion, the most important information is that which is contained in private e-mails. Many users are not weary in the least to tell other users very private ideas, thoughts and connections.
Google has harvesting engines that can associate words, thoughts and connections better that previous generations of their code, and this is used primarily to help advertisers associate their products and services with the as many different keywords as they possibly can.
Websites are generally static, but e-mail is always changing. Even the busiest blogger might change their site 3 times a day, a news site might change it 20 times, but an e-mail user could send and receive dozens. Imagine tying in all of a user's e-mails together to find insight into what they want and like and need.
At this point, is Google sorting through our e-mails at gmail? I'd say no. I don't think this will last -- and AOL's e-mail system is gigantic. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, but it is still massive data. On top of that, the noise that does exist (spam) may help Google implement better anti-spam routines in gmail.
Of course, I could be all wrong, but I've been studying Google for years now, and nothing they do surprises me. Everything they've been up to has been unique in how they attack their problems, and I do believe that their desire to catalog everything is true. I've said for over 15 years that the future is not products or services but information. The right company that can aggregate and align information for every user (consumer or producer) will be the wealthiest company in history.
Microsoft who?
$1 Billion for search engine optimization consulting?! I am in the wrong industry!
Remember, it's Google's site, not the advertisers'. They are a portal only to the extent that they wish to be; if Google wishes to sell parts of their site (e.g., ads) to others, that's their business, but ultimately claiming Google is unfairly censoring image ads is like claiming I'm unfairly preventing someone else's blog entries from appearing on my home page. Key word: MINE. Oh, and if you really want to see banner ads so badly, why not do a Google image search for them? They don't seem to be preventing those from showing up :P
-- Joren
Our goal is to organize all of the world's information.
There is a very fine line between organization and control. By sheer classification and by deciding interfaces and limits on how to access that information, you exert a signifigant amount of control over perception and equal ease of access to biased sources. What happens when you _have_ all the world's information indexed?
</tinfoil_hat>
And for the umpteenth time, your goal is to maximize shareholder profits (which arguable, may or may not be monetary).
I think whether or not their is any structural conflict depents a lot on the exact structure of the relationship. Since google and AOL aren't merging but google is only holding a stake in AOL this could be kept as a purely financial arrangement (lots of companies have random investments) which doesn't filter down to the actual people doing the work. Generally you don't want to be sharing technology and close access with companies you only own 5% of. Still the talk about indexing AOLs content makes one think that there is more to this than just a few contracts about keeping ad revenue and some stock changing hands.
In particular the choice of words made me suspect that somehow AOL content was being given *some* benefit. If nothing is different than before in terms of content indexing why not just say this instead of the weird roundabout bit about indexing AOL content like all other content. One (unlikely) possibility is that they could be helping AOL to optimize their layout for google search. A more plausible possibility (in my opinion) is that they are going to apply their relevance techniques to help AOL optimize the ads it places (e.g. analyze who clicks through aol content and help them figure out which keywords would be best). Additionally they may create a seperate search especially for AOL members, i.e., optimize the search AOL presents to its own users.
These are only speculation but I very much doubt that the temptation to screw up search will be very strong. Basically this structural conflicts of interest you talk about is just that google makes money if AOL does well. Other than this they have every motivation to just stick to the contracts. However, as google only owns 5% of AOL they only get 1/20 of every extra dollar of profit AOL makes back. So any tweak to their search engine to benefit AOL would have to be expected increase AOL's profit more that 20 times as much as it would hurt google's profit in order for their to be any temptation at all. Yet the credibility of a search engine is a key issue with users and google.com is the core of google. They have to realize that any tweaks to favor AOL will likely be noticed or leaked by disgruntled employees and lose them *tons* of visitors and hence money. So I really doubt their is much incentive to help AOL in the results at all.
Sure it would be more reassuring if google just did a search enginge and ads so we were sure they had no conflict of interest. However, even then they would have interests in making sure certain potential competitors *didn't* succeed. Moreover, in the real world google doesn't have this option. If they don't want to be beaten out by companies that have even more conflicts of interest they need to be willing to make strategic moves. While refusing to do anything of the kind may appear to be the high road in the short term if it just ultimately means google loses out and MS or some other company with tons of conflicts takes over it is really the worse option for us.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
We all know AOL has been bad for the net in some ways, but there is at least one good thing we can say about it. That is, it's the only company that held its own against Microsoft's attempts to dominate the IM world. Thankfully, they may have just held on long enough for Google to get the Jabber ball rolling at last.
It sounds to me that they're going to make darn sure AOL's content is properly indexed. That will have to change the results of a search from what it is today; helping AOL get better placement isn't bias?
Yes, they also work with other webmasters. And I suppose they do have to protect themselves from getting hit with a chair...
In other news...
AOL is mailing out 1 billion more CDs to the US market!
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
they deny that users will see any negative changes.
Do they mean any further negative changes?
With all of the various gStuff they have added, Google has become extremely more usable yet infinitly less usefull to me as a search engine...
Thanks, You have my continued support.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
AOL sells steak? Do you get potatos with it?
It's spelled "stake", moron.
AOL is evil. They have been evil since the C-64 days. At no time have they not been evil.
So, giving AOL a billion dollars to continue their work IS evil.
No, I'm not talking about google's site. Of course they can do what they want with that but they very clearly stated in the message that they wouldn't be changing or adding any crazy graphics to that.
I'm talking about whether adsense should include this type of stuff (it may already) but several people were bitching about this prospect.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Heh. My 1270th comment, and my first first post. I'd like to thank my typing instructor, and my witty repartee coach, and all you east coast bastards who got the day off.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why don't Google and Microsoft merge already!?!? I mean think about it for a minute. They are fighting each other like crazy. The only way they can both realize there goals and make tons of money easily is to merge. No more fighting. No more out bidding each other. Or put another way Google/Microsoft Market capatilzation: 200 Billion Dollars. No more slashdot stories about M$ Google wars: Priceless Google wants to index every bit of information everywhere. Video. Audio. IM. E-mail. HTML/XML/PDF/DOC/XLS/PPT on and on and on. Microsoft wants Windows on every computing device out there. What better way to accomplish both those goals then to merge? Oh you want powerful anytime/anywhere access to your info? Well just install Glindows 2007. Oh yeah we strip the metadata out! ;)
Can you say big brother?
Charles Wyble System Engineer
first of, it goes without saying misrosoft is pure evil.
Personal bias aside:
Microsoft is going to go out of buisness.
Google is poised to take over the desktop market
(if not globaly, then domesticly at least).
Think about it, nobody wants a computer, they want a web browser and an office suite.
If google can put OpenOffice online, then suddenly all people need is a thin client that can handle PPPoE/DHCP have a USB port for a memory key
and an embedded web browser. If you have access to that 2 Gig of gmail space from the online office, you can drop the mem key. And there are embedded systems booting of 64Meg flash drives that run linux and firefox today! I feel we are on the virge of a descktop revolution, poised to regress to the client/server model of times gone. Sure hackers, gear heads and gamers will keep their power systems, but your average CPA and her 12yo son will be happy with a thin client that takes up no more room than a LCD monitor, and a playstation 2.
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
Actually, I think the most important information are the secrets you whisper into google's ear.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. If google search results were unbiased, I wouldn't get search result summaries that have nothing to do with my search, except that have my exact search term inserted in the text. Of course, these biased results link to link trap sites or other sites that generate revenue for google...
No, that's not biased. Not at all.
Google swears users will not see any negative changes as a result of the AOL buyin...
of course, the word "negative" is subject to interpretation. Of course, Google and AOL execs would view banners and even more biased search results as a POSITIVE change, because it will give users what they want and offer them more opportunities to save blah blah blah.... or some other similar drivel...
How very very true
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Google says it all the time - they want to index the world.
Bill Gates and Microsoft have said several times - they want to give YOU the tools to index your information.
Note the difference in semantics. Google wants all the information in the world indexed in one place. Microsoft wants to sell each company the tools to index their own information.
-everphilski-
Adsense and embedding sponsored search results is great because they're not shaped like a banner.
Creating buzz about potential acquisitions, offering the potential of unlimited wealth to any media provider that gets acquired is a brilliant tool for Google. In return, no-one says anything negative about Google.
The revolution will have no banner ads.
Google has spoken! This is such important news!!!! Let me go get my stone tablet to inscribe their words of wisdom and convey them to the masses. Or maybe I'll just use Google's sock puppet, Slashdot.
It's just business. Next you'll see *gasp* Google and Microsoft doing some deals; ads, technology exchanges, whatever.
Before you guffaw too loudly, remember that Bill and Steve (J., not the chair guy) have had a biz relationship for years now.