AOL now joins the game. According to the Press Association, whose website is hosted in google, AOL’s advisers met with representatives from Yahoo to see if a deal is workable.
There is no definite terms available yet as of now.
One thing for sure is that Yahoo has choices apart from the one given by Microsoft.  In fact even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp also offered to buy  20%  of yahoo.
So far, based on comments and buzz over the internet,  some of Yahoo’s shareholders prefer the deal offered by Microsoft.
[via telegraph.co.uk ]

Last week CNET News.com sent 8 questions to each search engine in an attempt to rank them based on their own observation of themselves. This is in an attempt to help people understand the different policies used by each engine on specific issues. The engines included AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo and the questions asked included:

What search-related data–including IP addresses, cookie IDs, user identities, and search terms–do you retain?
How long do you retain those data?
If you retain data for a limited period of time, is it completely deleted (in such a way that the data and backups cannot …read more

Back in December of 2005 Google formed a strategic partnership with AOL for providing Google’s search & sponsored results on the AOL platform. This partnership is being strengthened this week with the introduction of an Adwords “private labeled” ad platform for AOL customers.
Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX.N: Quote, Profile , Research) AOL division will introduce a paid search service on Monday backed by Google Inc.’s (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile , Research) technology to help advertisers better target AOL users.
The service will help AOL capture advertising dollars from ads linked to search terms in text, in addition to the money it makes …read more

In an attempt to look beyond search AOL started to understand that search traffic may be the way to go and admits that as far as SEO and the parts of their site visible to the different search engines, only 15% is crawled and the rest, about 85% is still invisible, because it used to be in a closed network accessible to only paid subscribers.
More on AOL’s SEO problems in this Washington Post article.
[via Threadwatch]

AOL Research had released this week a dataset collected of 500,000 users over the course of 3 months. Shortly after they pulled it back fearing privacy issues that may come up. This move, however, was too late as mirrors were already posted, and now even tools are being built, such as this one which is not just another keyword research tool but also tells you the name of the site and the keywords used to reach it… Very useful.

Earlier today I posted about Yahoo’s Top Searches for 2005. I just found the AOL Search Year in Review for 2005 (compared to 2004) , as well as Lycos’s Top 100 search terms of 2005.
[Found via Search Engine Watch]

Financial Times reports today that Google had teamed up with Comcast to “take a joint minority stake in Time Warner’s AOL internet portal unit.”
While they were on it, they aparently wanted to make sure that no one can own the domain GoogleMotherFucker.com and registered it to their name. This domains joins a long list of domains already owned by GOOG.
[Source: Threadwatch]

After 3 months of beta, AOL’s new portal is officially released.
The new portal is pretty nice, very clean look. It features tabbed searching as well as links to many of AOL’s different services.
Nicely done.
[Source...]

For the past week there have been several rumors claiming that AOL’s time is up and that it is up for sale. MSN and Google were also mentioned as potential buyers.
These rumors have come to an end today when
Josh Berger, the managing director of Warner Bros Entertainment UK, has warned against his company selling off its internet interest.
He said that the internet portal could provide a platform over which Warner Bros content, which includes the Harry Potter films and television series such as The West Wing, could be distributed. : “AOL would be helpful to that process,” he said.
He …read more