I'm just praying it doesn't result in all of the fun that was had when the Microsoft Yahoo Search Alliance came about. Anyone who had to deal with the billing

I'm just praying it doesn't result in all of the fun that was had when the Microsoft Yahoo Search Alliance came about. Anyone who had to deal with the billing headaches at a search agency <raises hand> does not look fondly at that time. I wonder what this will do to Search Partner Network performance for AdWords customers. AOL represented one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) search partners. The Search Partner Network is one of the few areas of AdWords that is still a black box wrt placement-level performance (unlike the GDN). Previously the only way to get visibility into the AOL portion of it was to run directly with AOL using AOL's licensed version of the AdWords UI, but with some minor differences in how you used it. If the biggest volume driver of Search Partner volume goes >poof< I'd expect that to noticeably impact performance for Search Partner traffic. Would love an official comment from Google on this here, on their blog, or through industry pubs like SearchEngineLand.