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Google just acquired a 5% stake in AOL for $1 Billion, shutting Microsoft out of the deal.” Under this new agreement, among many other things, Google Talk will now interface with AOLs instant messenger according to the announcement on Google’s site. From the announcement: Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said AOL is one of Googles longest-standing partners, and we are thrilled to strengthen and expand our relationship. Today’s agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content.

Googleblog writes

The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We’d like to clear some of those up.

- Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner’s page ranks high, it’s because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us.

- Indexing more of AOL’s content. Our goal is to organize all of the world’s information. When we say “all the world’s information,” this includes AOL’s. We’re going to work with the webmasters at AOL — just as we work with webmasters all over the world — to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don’t inadvertently overlook their content.

Microsoft Corperation and Google have reached a settlement in their legal battle over former Microsoft employee and now current Google employee Kai-Fu Lee.

In a statement made by Microsoft and confirmed by Google the three parties had entered into a private agreement that resolves all issues to their mutual satisfaction.

Google released a statement from Lee saying he was pleased with the terms of the settlement agreement, according to the Associated Press.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed publicy!