NYT: Rebuffing aggressive overtures from Microsoft, Time Warner has agreed to sell a 5 percent stake in America Online to Google for $1 billion as part of an expanded partnership between AOL, once the dominant company on the Internet, and Google, the current online king.
Negotiations between the three companies reached a fevered pitch on Thursday night when teams from Google and Microsoft were in separate rooms of the Time Warner Center in Manhattan and executives from the media company walked back and forth between them.
Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.
The coverage of this issue has been lackluster, to say the least. No one seems to talk about, or even consider–the “favored placement” in question will be confined to the Sponsored Links area of the site.
I know everyone is SO concerned with Google results–but how often do you look at the Sponsored Links and say “hey, I bet THEY didn’t really pay to be on top!”
So if you consider that “muddied results”, then by all means, continue your echoes of the rest of the blogosphere’s belly-aching.
I just wish our big glut of citizen-generated content had a brain of its own, sometimes.
Uh, oh, we’ve irritated Blogebrity. Now we’ll never be C-listed.
BTW, thanks Kyle for clarifying the issue for us lowly regurgitators.
Hey David, should I have heard of this “Blogebrity” site? And doesn’t that name just rollllll off the tongue?
Tom,
Not if you have a life away from your keyboard.