What the Google-AOL deal means for users

Google is promising to keep its home page uncluttered and banner-free and its search results and keyword ad auction unbiased, despite paying $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in Time Warner’s Internet unit last week.

Instead, people may see small graphical ads on Google’s home and search results pages and banner ads on video and image pages, more exposure to Google’s Web crawler for America Online sites, prominent links on Google Video to AOL video content and lots of chat between the popular AOL Instant Messenger program and the nascent Google Talk.

The change for users “will be very slight, especially from the core Google experience,” Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said in an interview with CNET News.com.

“There is a lot of fear that there will be banner ads now on the Google home page. We are not considering that at all,” she said. “There is concern about biased search results and we are not doing that.”

Accompanying existing text ads on the Google home page and search results pages, there may eventually be “small graphical elements”–smaller than thumbnail images–from AOL or other advertisers, Mayer said in the interview. Meanwhile, banner or display ads could appear on Google’s video and image search sites, she said.

“There will be no banner ads on the Google home page or Web search results pages,” she wrote in a Dec. 22 posting on the Official Google Blog. “There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”

Full article: News.com

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