Google’s official blog has finally posted something on the AOL deal which is supposed to clear up the “rumors and misconceptions.” It does and it doesn’t. Written by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience, the entry seeks to reassure everyone that Google will not bias its search results or ad auction in favor of AOL or Time Warner products.
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.
What Google plans to do is index more of AOL’s content, according to Mayer, and work with AOL’s webmasters, “just as we work with webmasters all over the world — to help them understand how the Google crawler works.”
Hmmm…is that all AOL got out of the deal search engine-wise? John Battelle, for one, isn’t buying it.
I find it difficult to believe Parsons and Miller settled for “help us get smarter about how to be indexed by you, Google. Thanks very much.”
Google’s explanation is indeed really thin — with all the public worry over the threat the deal poses to Google’s objectivity, Google is simply saying that it will do for AOL what it does for anybody? Here’s Battelle’s take:
I think to myself: Er, you’ve been an AOL partner - in a very major way - for more than five years. And you’re NOW just getting around to this? AOL has never talked to Google about redirects? Indexing non HTML content? Robots.txt? I find that, well, hard to believe. Something is not quite adding up.
I don’t believe Google is hiding anything. I think the company is having a very hard time coming up with a public explanation of this aspect of its deal with AOL. I suspect that part of the reason Google can’t articulate exactly what’s going on is that Google doesn’t know yet.
In the heat of negotiations, this “search engine optimization” deal point was probably thrown in during the bottom of the ninth, with Google’s engineers confident that they can do something for AOL that doesn’t compromise anything. What that something is probably has yet to be determined.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:05 PM|Comments(2)
If you read the news, and exercise some common sense, it's obvious that's *not* all that AOL got out of the deal. They got $1 billion. Even to AOL/Time Warner that's not chicken feed.
They'll also, pretty obviously, get dragged out of a several year slump by a significantly more innovative and forward thinking company. They'll get advertising on other Google sites, more branding presence (as if those millions of CDs they waste sending to your home isn't enough), etc.
Posted by: Jeff Perren at December 30, 2005 1:09 PM
I didn't know that they had posted something on Google's blog, so thanks for the information!!
Posted by: WebtrafficJunkie at December 23, 2005 5:17 PM
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