Too bad for Microsoft, it looks like Google will be buying a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion. Big suprise? No. AOL is reponsible for 10% of Google’s revenues. For me this is good news because I recieve a sizable share of traffic from AOL, which is fed by Google’s results. However, there is something in this NYTimes article that sounded a little disturbing to me.

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.

So what exactly does this mean?