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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."
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 :(
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My guess is that will be up to the site displaying the ads. And for that i'd say you can't fault Google; they'd be losing out on a lot of potential marketshare by not offering graphical ads. If some website wants to get paid to host some ads, it's up to them to decide what type of ads they want to host. And if they want to host banner ads (more money in those, i assume?) and Google can't do anything for them, then they'll just host banner ads through another service (doubleclick, whatever). Google loses out on a potential customer. By offerring graphical ads Google gets to snag those customers, but that does not mean we'll see more annoying popups and banners, it only means those websites that aer willing to subject their readers to that kind of thing in the first place have another option to choose from. We may see some sites that use Google text ads switch to graphical ads; but I think the major change will be Google will steal away customers from doubleclick and the likes--just a change in what service the webstie that already host graphical ads use, not necessarily an increase in the number of sites that use graphical ads.
You could get into a whole moral debate about not offerring a service you fundamnetally disagree with, and that offerring it because "if we don't do it someone else will anyway" is no excuse; but noone ever said (well, Google never said (did they?)) that they're on a moral campaign against graphical ads, just that they recognize that they'll get more users if they don't have them on their own site. If someone else wants to have graphical ads, well that's their own decision to make. I'll just be that much less likely to visit that site, and that's my decision to make.
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.
Exactly - Google just spent a billion dollars protecting a big chunk of their revenue stream which is highly vulnerable. The problem (for Google) that I see is that every knows this - Microsoft know it and, most importantly, AOL know this. It seems to me that AOL have Google over a barrel to a certain extent because AOL could still jump into bed with Microsoft and screw Google over. Who's to say that AOL won't continue to require favours from Google in the future in order to prevent this?
Because all said and done, Google has not given us any reasons to be suspicious of them. This is the giant chasm that Google has managed to cross - they are a huge corporation with complete trust of users like me because I see them constantly innovate. The day they stop wowing me with new functionality I will start complaining but until then I will keep my mouth shut because I know that far more superior brains than mine are at work at Google.
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:
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?
Just like Google crawls many scholarly archives that the public doesn't have access to, but shows results for them, Google is starting to crawl all kinds of content that isn't typically public. AOL/Time Warner has a ton of content, and they provide a ton of services to subscribers including all kinds of live concert feeds, news sources that typically need to be paid for, videos, shows, streaming radio. AOL is big, bigger than the slashdot group think would have you believe. Google made almost half a billion dollars last year just through AOL users using Google. If Google didn't invest in AOL, Microsoft was going to and that would have knocked out a major partner for Google. This is just Google insuring this large stream of revenue continues from AOL, and also they happen to be able to crawl more data now.
Regards,
Steve
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:
It was reported on CNBC this morning during the "Morning Call". It was the result of some court settlement.
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.
companies (espacially big ones) are more or less meant to be evil
And here is where I stopped listening to what you had to say... talk about childish.
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