The long, slow death of The NY Times

[avram]

NY Times, “Time Warner Plans to Sell 5% of AOL to Google”:

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.

Well, that’s kinda distressing. Let’s see what other sources have to say.

LA Times, “Google Poised to Invest $1 Billion in AOL”:

To close the deal, Google made some key concessions.

Its negotiators agreed to promote AOL’s services across Google.com, a change for the company that made famous the sparse white Web page. Google also hired AOL to sell non-search ads to Google’s advertising partners.

Oh, they’re just talking about ad banners, not search results, it sounds like. Let’s look some more.

San Jose Mercury News, “Google buying 5 percent of AOL for $1 billion”:

The partnership could also herald a new experience for people who use Google’s search engine, because it allows AOL to place advertising with images on Google’s search results pages. Until now, Google’s search engine has been devoid of any image ads.

Red Herring, “AOL Talks Just to Google”:

The two will also deepen their advertising relationship. AOL will sell advertising for Google’s search results on AOL’s sites. In return, Google will promote AOL’s sites in the sponsored links in its search results. It will also include AOL’s collection of online videos in its results.

Yep, looks like everyone but the NY Times agrees that they’re talking about ads, not the search results themselves. I think it’s time to just plain stop reading the Paper of Record.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I stopped relying on the NYTimes when they ran an article about how the New York City dialect was dying out. Every expert they quoted clearly said that the New York City Metropolitan Area Dialect was changing rather than dying.

The paper I've found most reliable (by the standard of having fewest errors in areas where I'm knowledgeable) is USA Today.

[dotsomething.livejournal.com]

That's alarming (thank goodness I don't read the NY Times anymore).

I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase

[cheshyre]

My company was in talks with Google over a special deal. Trying to figure out how much is nonconfidential.

If you do a Google search on bush, above the results will be a "News results for bush" taking you to Google News. If you Google on "saturn photos", the first few pics from Google Images appear... above the search results

They were offering such placement to our company, and I'll bet that's what AOL could get as well. Not ads on the side like Google currently has, but putting hits to AOL content above the search results.

Re: I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase

[avram]

Wait, were they offering special placement, ahead of the other sources listed in Google News? Or were they just offering the opportunity to be listed as a source in Google News?

Re: I'm not sure the NYT is so offbase

[cheshyre]

That OneBox is a special field that appears above the results in standard Google searches. Right now you see it on certain queries (like I demonstrated) where the OneBox content offers to take you to Google Images or Google News. And notice that appears before any results from the main Google index?

That's what they were offering our company. We're a database aggregator: licensed articles from magazines and scholarly journals. Putting results from our content in that spot above the rest of the results. [I don't yet know the status of negotiations]

That's what I suspect they might've been offering AOL/Time-Warner. That placement.

PS: do NOT credit me by name or handle. I don't want any risk that even pseudonymously this could be traced back to my employer.