found drama

As noted last week, Google and AOL are on the merge. And today it’s official.

[The] comments followed a decision by Time Warner’s board of directors on Tuesday to approve a deal in which Google, the world’s leading internet search company, will pay $1bn for a 5 per cent stake in AOL, giving the business an implied value of $20bn.

No shortage of interesting points to speculate on. Roll AIM and GoogleTalk into one? (Just kidding?)

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, on Tuesday called the deal “an important next step” for both companies. “Today’s agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content…”

I thought Google’s engine was designed to be leveraged on everything publicly available on the web in the first place? Or is that just the thing? It seems to be all about the ads and ad revenue – – which makes sense. Everyone keeps pointing out that this could potentially compromise Google’s search integrity but somehow I doubt it. This isn’t about the indexing – – this is about the sponsored links and the AdWords and all that. It’s about getting advertisers to put tons of confidence into AOL and leveraging AOL’s agreement to get preferential positioning on the right hand side of the search results. Time will tell but the index on its own is to sacred to fuck with. At least in that way.

currently playing: Hybrid “Finished Symphony”

UPDATE: And here’s the Slashdot thread… Some good comments on who is getting what out of the deal and (surprise?) a bunch on the unified IM theory…

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