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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."
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?
...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.
I read that (and I might be wrong) that Google makes $400 Million in ad revenue from AOL subscribers (who, presumably, arrive at google from AOL). If microsoft had bought this steak in AOL, and cut Google out of AOL, then Google would be out $400Million a year.
I see this purchase as Google protecting the traffic it gets from AOL. In a little over 2 years they will have made their $1 billion back.
Remember when Ballmer said "I'm going to kill google?". Google just spent some of its HUGE cash pile on protection against MS. Fair play to 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...!