About the AOL announcement (2005) | Hacker News Reader

About the AOL announcement (2005)

googleblog.blogspot.com

> There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

How times have changed.

https://mashable.com/2012/08/28/google-homepage-ad

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/24/google-br...

Never say never.

Or alternately, go ahead and say it, nobody really cares.

To be fair, there aren't "banner ads" on either the Google homepage or the search results pages. Neither are there "crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up". There are definitely ads on the search results pages, and they take too much vertical space IMO, but they're text and small images, not flashing and tacky stuff.

completely depends on your definition of "crazy". I mean Google used to show ads for a particular drug if you searched for suicide methods that would call for such drug.... that's pretty crazy in my book.

also most of the deal was about video ads. just take a look at YouTube.

well yes, the genius is that the ads on the google page are virtually indistinguishable from actual results. is that better or worse?

I feel like they did do some of that, although the spirit of what they're saying remains true to some extent.

Well, compared to the rest of the internet today (including mashable that you provide a link to), they are wayyyyyy less flashy and graphical. I wish the rest of the internet was a clean as google's homepage.

Google to Invest $1 Billion for a 5% Stake in AOL

Companies to Collaborate on Online Video Offering and Make More AOL Content Available to Google Users

(http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2005/12/time-warners-aol-and...)

Wow, I really didn’t remember!

At that time Google Video was a decent alternative to Youtube.

Google SERP with banner ads (2019): https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1098939747018461184

I was more surprised with how archaic the word "webmaster" sounds today.

Note this is the 2005 deal. The 2002 ad deal with AOL is probably the single moment that defined the business success of Google, the moment when the AdWords product took off and became the unstoppable juggernaut. I'm still impressed with Google's executive team, particularly Salar, that the deal worked even better than we could have hoped. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/business/technology-aol-s...

This was important at the time. AOL's ad inventory converted VERY well and it was very strategic to keep it out of the hands of Microsoft/Bing and Yahoo, both of whom were serious competitors (on hindsight this was where they were actually beginning to diverge and hit their maxima). In the two sided ads marketplace this was critical to have the most and the highest-quality inventory to bring more network effects w/ advertisers getting good results. The investment was terrible but I suppose they just wrote it down as a $1b fee to keep Yahoo off of AOL.

Google sold back it's 5% stake in 2009 for $283.0 million.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/technology/companies/28ao...

minor correction: Bing didn't exist then; it was created in 2009.

"Our goal is to organize all of the world's information."

Funny how this seems much creepier in 2019 than it did in 2005...

Yeah. In 2005 I had no idea they meant "personal information".

Although in 2005 maybe they hadn't even realized yet.

They didn't have any clue. Back in 2005 personal data and access logs and analytics was considered a chore, you'd delegate the annoyance of log rotation to some sys admin or helpdesk intern and generally purge all data as quickly as possible because storage was expensive.

Occasionally someone would make a cool tool that parsed htaccess logs and gave you a neat visualization or something, but that was it. Literally nobody tracked anything on the internet.

It almost seems like fiction when I type it out now.

The writing style is really different in Google blog posts today.

It really shows how the blog post passing through PR, legal, etc. review makes it bland and almost meaningless.

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