14 DAY TRIAL // AOL has just announced that it has renewed its search deal with Google for an additional five years. The announcement came as somewhat of a surprise as the previous agreement was set to expire only later in the year.
"Today is another important step in the turnaround of AOL," said Tim Armstrong, AOL's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "AOL users will be getting a better search and search ads experience from the best search company in the world -- Google... All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal."
"We're excited to deepen our partnership. This agreement combines Google's expertise in search and advertising with AOL's strength in online content," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Google.
Google will continue to power AOL searches and search advertising. The two companies have had a similar partnership for the past ten years.
The last deal was about to expire later this year. AOL started looking for alternatives about a year ago and has said it has reviewed several bids from other search players. AOL hasn't named any of the six or so candidates but they are said to include Bing, Yahoo and Baidu.
However, AOL said that Google came with the best offer and in the end, things were sped up as AOL was satisfied.
The new deal expands on the previous one. Google will now provide new search technologies to AOL, not just the basic results.
More interesting, it also includes mobile search and a video component. The details of the mobile search deal have not been completed yet.
The second new part of the deal will put more AOL videos on YouTube and videos will be better promoted. AOL is already a big source for online video, though some of those come from partners and are not produced by AOL directly.