Armstrong Hints AOL Will Renew Search Deal With Google: “Distribution Is Almost As Important To Us As Money”

During today’s AOL earnings call, which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search share in the U.S.

But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing.  Microsoft can throw all the money it wants at AOL on the search side, it probably won’t make a difference. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes:

On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have a long partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.

So he is not ruling out Bing entirely, but if you read between the lines it is clear that he values Google almost as much as a distribution partner as he does as a search partner. Add in the fact that he still seems to be on good terms with his former boss Eric Schmidt, and it is clear that he is leaning heavily towards sticking with Google.

Oh, by the way, this also means that he’s fine with Google being a huge news aggregator, because those links are extremely valuable and he understands that better than the CEOs of most other media companies. Google’s unique position as a source of traffic to Websites is one of its great strengths in any negotiation involving another Web company. I’ve heard this before from other Web CEOs who let Google get away with a better deal than they would otherwise because they fear reprisals in the form of lower search traffic. Google, of course, needs to keep up appearances that it delivers the best search results no matter what, but there are other ways Google can help juice a site’s traffic.

Update: As I was writing this post, Tim Armstrong called me. He emphasized that “Overall, we do feel distribution is important, we also like revenue. We will balance those things.” It all “comes down to what the actual distribution deal is.” In other words, he is still negotiating.

But he did shed some light on how a distribution deal could work. “You can’t really affect the index in partnership deals,” he explains, but there are lots of other things AOL and Google coudl do. On AOL’s end, it could change the way pages are set up and how much advertising is on each page to make them appear in results better. On Google’s end, there are opportunities to get more traffic “through Oneboxes and other types of integration like on the News property.” (The Onebox is Google’s unified results at the top of organic search which pulls from different sources). Another possibility is to include search advertising inventory into the deal. So Armstrong is definitely thinking creatively about how to get the most out of his next search deal.

Lost Roman Codex Fragments Found in Book Binding

Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books.

The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single manuscript.

The Codex Gregorianus covered the laws of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to those of Diocletian, ruler from A.D. 284 to 305.

Later codices excerpted the laws that were still relevant and added new ones, so only parts of the first codex survived as passages in other editions. All copies of the original collection of laws were thought to have been lost.

Luckily, in the 16th century it was common to use scraps of paper to reinforce the bindings of new books.

Seventeen such fragments—each smaller than 2 square inches (13 square centimeters)—were recovered from a set of books decades ago. The scraps were eventually acquired by a private owner, who recently loaned them to Roman-law experts at University College London.

A preservation librarian who examined the scraps told the researchers that the shapes of the pieces and the patterns of wear suggest the ancient papers had been wrapped around cords that went over the books' spines.

"We saw a couple key phrases and realized this was a kind of legal text," said study leader Benet Salway. "We matched it against the database of legal pronouncements we had, and found it didn't match anything."

But a few of the phrases matched passages in the Justinian Code, compiled in the sixth century, leading the team to conclude that the unfamiliar sections were from a source text: the Codex Gregorianus.

The paper fragments themselves are not from the original codex, but they could be from a copy that dates back as far as A.D. 400, the researchers said.

Only the fragments containing text that overlaps with known parts of the Justinian Code could be translated, and that text deals with appeals and the statute of limitations for an unknown matter.

But the fragments were annotated between the lines in Greek, a commonly spoken language by the end of the fifth century, implying that this particular copy of the Codex Gregorianus was used heavily, Salway said.

"The language of the law was Latin, but a lot of users of this text [would have been] Greek speakers, and they'd need to be able to understand it."

Since the pieces were found inside an unrelated book, the find doesn't increase the researchers' chances of locating the rest of the Codex Gregorianus. But "what I would hope is that it raises awareness of the possibility of this still being out there," Salway said.

"I'm not advocating that all [16th-century] books' bindings be ripped off—though we might find all sorts of interesting things in there—but when these books are conserved, care should be taken to see what is inside."

Mercury Probe Searches for Vulcanoids, Spies Venus

That's the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury.

In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the tiny planet through a backyard telescope is like trying to make out the patterns on a moth's wing as it sits on a football stadium floodlight.

Bigger telescopes on the ground or in Earth orbit can see the planet, but in doing so, glare from the sun would damage the instruments' sensitive lenses.

Even Hubble, capable of peering into the far reaches of the universe, can't safely look too hard at the innermost planet.

To really see details on Mercury, you need a spacecraft that gets close enough to keep the sun's glare out of the frame.

Mariner 10 gave humans our first good look at Mercury during a series of flybys in 1974 and 1975. But that mission was able to take pictures of just half the planet—we had to wait until January 2008 to see the other side!

Our first glimpse of Mercury's "hidden" face came via the MESSENGER mission, a spacecraft now swirling around Mercury in a gravitational dance that will eventually see the probe settle into orbit in 2011.

Along the way, MESSENGER has been taking scads of pictures, and one of its targets has been the stretch of space inside Mercury's orbit where small, faint vulcanoids could be hiding.

The concept of vulcanoids arose from research done in the late 1800s, when astronomers trying to use the classical rules of celestial mechanics to chart Mercury's orbit kept finding things wrong with their calculations.

French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph le Verrier took the challenge to heart, and in 1860 he announced that discrepancies in Mercury's orbit were due to an unseen planet, which he named Vulcan.

Le Verrier's theory was eventually disproven thanks to Einstein's revolutionary theory of relativity—when you include the sun's gravitational field in the mix, Mercury's orbit works out just fine, thanks, no extra planet required.

But the concept of something being between Mercury and the sun has lived long and prospered, and a number of missions (some using fighter jets!) have kept the search alive over the years.

MESSENGER has been making its vulcanoid searches when its orbit brings it closest to the sun. The craft has taken a host of snapshots in June 2008, February 2009, and most recently in January 2010. So far, nada.

But on January 16 MESSENGER did get an eyeful of neighboring Venus, the brightest dot in this polka dotted field of view.

Of course, Venus is so wildly overexposed in this picture that it looks like someone shot a hole in the sky.

But that highlights just how hard MESSENGER has to stare to even hope to catch a glimpse of a vulcanoid—if any are out there at all.

On eBay, Twitter Followers Are Worth Less Than A Penny Each

It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter’s Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SULto be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.

Today, you can “buy” followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back).

How do they do this? Well, there are automated bots, of course. But another method we’ve heard about anecdotally uses cheap labor in China to create Twitter Follower farms (similar to the gold farms that grew around online games like World of Warcraft). Online laborers in China essentially create thousands of Twitter accounts which can then follow other accounts. Yes, people are actually paying for this worthless service. The sellers on eBay may very well use different methods. But the fact that these types of followers are worthless shows in the plummeting rate for Twitter followers from a quarter each a year ago to less than a penny now.

So are Twitter followers simply worthless as many people have suspected all along? I think you have to distinguish between real followers and fake followers (maybe Twitter could start a Verified Follower service), and how engaged those followers are. Do they retweet a lot and engage in conversation, or never tune in at all? Follower counts don’t tell you that. Just as all Website visitors are not worth the same, neither are all Twitter followers. But you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.

Google Labs Adds Search Icon To ‘Compose Mail’ Window In Gmail

This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search, that wasintroduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail.

The first iteration of the labs feature added a ‘Web Search’ box next to the main column (left side on the screenshot) that provides much of the same functionality, only you needed to remember to go to the side column to run a search. Now, enabling the feature also adds an icon to the top toolbar in the ‘Compose Mail’ window, where you can also customize colors and fonts for your message, add links and emoticons and more.

It’s unclear when the icon was added, but we can’t retrieve any mention about this on the Gmail blog and today marks the first time we’ve seen it.

The icon opens up a search box at the bottom of your screen and lets you run a search like you would using the regular Google search interface. A small arrow opens up a limited menu where you can paste results, paste URL and send by e-mail (which is kind of redundant in this case, since you’re already in a new e-mail). If you have a chat conversation open in Gmail, you’ll also get an extra option to send search results to your contact.

Obviously, this isn’t a ground-breaking feature, but if you’re a Gmail user you might want to (re-)enable the Labs feature in Settings. Guaranteed to save you quite some time.

New "Destroyer" Dinosaur Found, Was T. Rex Relative

A 29-foot-long (9-meter-long) "destroyer" dinosaur once reigned over the Wild West, according to a new study of a fossil T. rex relative found in New Mexico.

Two nearly complete skeletons of the new species, Bistahieversor sealeyi—eversor means "destroyer" in Latin—were discovered in the desolate badlands of New Mexico's Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness.

A "teenager's" skeleton was found between 1989 and 1990, and an adult was unearthed in 1998, researchers say. The fossils had been on display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History until recently, so scientists hadn't previously had a chance to study the remains.

Discovering that B. sealeyi is a primitive Tyrannosaurus rex relative—and, like T. rex, part of a group called the tyrannosauroids—is a "big deal," said study co-author Thomas Carr, director of the Carthage College Institute of Paleontology in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

"In and of itself, a relatively complete dinosaur from 75 million years ago in New Mexico is not common," he said. But "it's doubly rare to have a predator like this."

Scant tyrannosauroid teeth and scraps of bone had previously been found in the Southwest. But they all had come from tyrannosauroid species known to live in the northern Rocky Mountain region.

But B. sealeyi is a completely new species, found nowhere else—proving that the Southwest had its own top predator stalking the tropical forests and rivers of the late Cretaceous period.

When Carr first heard a new tyrannosauroid fossil had been found, "I was very excited, because I knew that if it was complete, we would actually finally know tyrannosauroids were living in the Southwest," he said.

What's more, finding the teenaged B. sealeyi skeleton and partial skull gives the scientists "a really unique snapshot of the biological development of this particular dinosaur," he said.

For instance, the team found that a hole above the adult's eyes—one of many air sacs common in tyrannosaur skulls—was not present in the young dinosaur's skeleton.

This suggests that the hole developed in adulthood, he said, although scientists aren't sure what the hole's function might have been.

B. sealeyi also had a deep snout like T. rex, though the two species are not closely related, Carr said.

Deeper—or shorter—snouts may have evolved in concert with a more powerful bite and smaller forearms in tyrannosauroids in western North America andAsia, which were connected during the Cretaceous.

"The main implement of killing was the head, and they needed the power for that," Carr said. 

But for some reason, tyrannosauroids in eastern North America retained the more primitive features of shallow snouts and large arms.

For B. sealeyi to have a deep snout suggests that the adaptation evolved early in tyrannosauroids—opening up new mysteries in tyrannosaur evolution.

"We can answer what happened, and if we're lucky, we can answer how things happened," Carr said, but "we can't answer why."

Year's Biggest Full Moon, Mars Create Sky Show

The biggest full moon of 2010 will rise in the east Friday night, and it'll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon.

January's full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month's full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter. (Take a moon myths and mysteries quiz.)

The 2010 wolf moon will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year, because our cosmic neighbor will actually be closer to Earth than usual.

The moon will be at its closest perigee—the nearest it gets to our planet during its egg-shaped orbit—for 2010 at 4:04 a.m. ET Saturday, reaching a distance of 221,577 miles (356,593 kilometers) from Earth.

At its farthest from Earth, the moon is said to be at apogee. Perigee and apogee each happen generally once a month, but the moon's wobbly orbit means that the satellite's exact distance at each of those events varies over the year. The moon's phase can also be different during each apogee and perigee.

"This month has the largest full moon of 2010, because it coincides with the special moment when the full moon happens to occur on the same day as it is at perigee," said Marc Jobin, an astronomer at the Montréal Planetarium.

And in a remarkable coincidence, Mars is at opposition Friday—directly opposite to the sun in the sky—so that as the sun sets in the southwest, Mars rises in the northeast.

Around opposition, the red planet gets closest to Earth. This year Mars swung by at just 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) on January 27, and it will still appear remarkably bright during the weekend sky show.

"To the naked eye it will appear as a bright, orange-colored star right next to the full moon—the pair will jump out at you for sure," Jobin said.

Because this unusually close perigee is happening during a full moon, it is expected to have an effect on Earth's tides.

These effects should be modest, most likely measurable in inches, although perigee tides can be higher if there happens to be a storm surge at the same time.

As for observing the effects of perigee on the moon itself, most casual observers should notice an obvious difference in the moon's apparent size as it rises above the eastern horizon, Jobin said.

That's when an optical illusion usually comes into play that makes any full moon seem larger, since the moon is set against familiar Earthly objects rather than appearing high in the empty sky.

"The combination of the two effects—perigee and moon illusion—will be really be noticeable and spectacular near the horizon," Jobin said.