In a move perhaps signalling the beginning of the end, AOL hands over a 5% stake in the company to Google in exchange for a billion in cash and 300 million in advertising credit.

The New York Times reports.

The beginning of the end of what? Google now owns 5% of AOL. With as much cash as Google has to throw around, this foot in the door for the mergers and acquisitions arm of Google will not be static. This is the beginning of a huge and very important merger/acquistion/takeover.

And that, of course is the least discussed component of the 'deal' by the New York Times report. Given much more attention is the issue of Google, always known for its search engine's unobtrusive ads, allowing pictures to accompany the text ads. Any of you that ever venture over to places like moviefone.com or any other portals made spectacular by ad graphics that overwhelm the screen, know where this addition of graphics will eventually lead. And that is about the only positive thing in this deal because the addition of obtrusive graphics will make offend users leading them to other search engines with less ads. Not to mention no spying. So while crazy ads suck, giving us a reason to opt out from Google, in the long term, might work out for the better.

Another point in this 'deal' that's not as innocuous as ad graphics, that the Times does its readers a disservice by glossing over is that AOL seems to be buying better search results. Since the advent of the search engine, one of the fears has been that it would become a tool for controlling the internet by way of steering users in certain directions and by default, away from other sites.
The Times writes:

Google also agreed to provide technical assistance to AOL to help explain how to make its pages easier for Google to find and include in its index of the web.

This pay-for-play kind of relationship in a word is scary. Google is going to explain to AOL how to make AOL pages show up at the top of the list more often. If AOL can make a deal with Google for this, others can(have?) too. AOL can afford to. Maybe the DNC or RNC or their funders, maybe they can afford to pay for play.

Is Google gonna throw a sweetheart deal like that my way? The potential ideological, censorship and political implications of this type of business relationship are obvious. And the Times, as usual, does the reader a disservice by doing all it can in its reporting to make the obvious obscure.