Google has taken some time to dispel concerns about its expanded partnership with AOL. With the clarifications, however, it now looks like the deal was not so sweet, with the only real positive for Time Warner's online unit being the $1 billion dollar investment by the search engine.
Google vice president of search Marissa Mayer posted the clarifications to the Google Blog on Thursday night. "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," Mayer wrote.
In exchange for the investment, Google effectively closed out competitors -- something vocal company shareholder Carl Icahn publicly warned about -- and it now appears it gave AOL very little in return.
Google said that rumors of possible favoritism toward AOL-based sites in its results were untrue. Mayer said that business deals never affect search results, and if a site is listed high on a page, it is simply a better answer to the search query.
AOL's pages would also receive no special treatment in the way they are indexed, as Mayer said Google would work with the online service in the same way it does with other companies to help them catalog their pages properly.
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