America Online Inc. said yesterday that Google Inc. will provide paid listings in search areas of AOL, AOL.com, CompuServe and Netscape, replacing Overture Services Inc.
Google's service will begin rolling out on AOL's proprietary service and on AOL.com immediately and will launch on Netscape and CompuServe in the next several weeks.
Upon completion of the rollout, Google will be the exclusive provider of sponsored links for those America Online properties.
Google, which already reportedly processes 150 million searches a day, now gets access to AOL's 34 million users.
Google and Overture are the leading providers of paid search services.
Overture, for example, provides Yahoo with paid links in the first three slots of its search results pages. Advertisers bid on those links, which are labeled “sponsored matches,” to get top ranking.
Advertisers pay per click for these listings. Overture shares revenue with Yahoo for featuring them.
Non-sponsored search results are also labeled as such and are featured under the sponsored ones.
Paid search results are one type of online advertising that marketers perceive positively because people who are actively searching for a product tend to be highly qualified leads.
