Google Evil - oh no not again

I think Matt Asay is missing the point. Google taking money for prefered search listing positions is not news, even if its AOL/Time Warner. Google has been taking money for prefered search listing places for as long as they have been selling ads, and anyone who has paid for their AdWords service know its strictly a highest bider gets highest users.placing and most listing system. So AOL/Time Warner just boought their way to the top - for a while, I sincerely doubt its an indefinite agreement.

No, I think its now a case of guilt, or evil by association with AOL, for goodness sake couldn't they have found some other company more useful to sink $1 billion into? I mean we're talking about AOL here, the internet has been and renowned target of the a**holes on line nickname for its role as first and last bastion of clueless Internet neophytes who needed to be coseted and protected from the "real" internet, while all the while being rapped in a loathesome ad-ridden content world. Indeed the biggest technological problem AOL probably ever solved was how to jam all that ad content down a dial-up line.

Since Google will now own 5% of AOL I'll have to consider Google 5% evil. Even more puzzling is how AOL managed to value itself at $20 billion - is it really worth that much now? I mean this isn't a 5% slice of Time Warner we're talking about, its of AOL right?