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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;
When Google came for the AOL'ers, I said nothing, because I was not a 12 year old girl.
When Google came for the MSN'ers, I said nothing, because I was not a 50 year old grandma.
When Google came for the Myspace'rs, I said nothing, because I was not a 15 year old emo freak.
When Google came for the Yahoo'ers, I said nothing, because I was not a mentality retarded person.
Then, Google came for slashdot, and I was like.. meh.. whatever.
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 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.
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?