About the AOL/Google announcement

About the AOL announcement: "Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience

My comments are in italics.

The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up.

- 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.

I never actually worried about this. Google compromising their search results would floor and upset me.

- 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.

Not a big shocker again. I know Google works with other companies very closely to make sure their stuff can be indexed well so this doesn't really change much but put it to paper.

- AOL will receive a credit towards advertising purchased through Google's ad program. You might wonder if this will affect the ad auction. It won't. We don't offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners.

This was kind of interesting. But if you think about it, if someone clicks on an add while viewing AOL thanks to a Google ad, the lost revenue is not too extreme.

- We have a service called 'onebox' for which we provide some additional links separate from ads (sponsored links) and search ...

This is the only place where the deal kind of skews from previous practice. I have never come across a company-specific onebox except something like UPS tracking numbers. This could be grouped in that area, but it is just much more general.