In what is being described as an "audience research agreement," Google and TiVo have announced an ad data deal, whereby TiVo will provide Google anonymous viewing trends, collected from TiVo's subscriber base with Google. The companies have clarified that the data that TiVo collects will neither result in any information being tied to the customers' accounts nor will any contextual ads pop up on their systems.

The Tuesday-announced Google-TiVo agreement will, for all intents and purposes, enable Google's television advertisers to gauge the performance of the ads that they place using the Google TV Ads platform.

TiVo's data essentially pertains to the customers' viewing statistics related to the company's live and time-shifted content, provided by cable, satellite, and telecom companies, as well as over- the-air broadcasting.

About the Google-TiVo ad data deal, the financial terms of which remained undisclosed, Todd Juenger, Tivo's VP and general manager of audience research and measurement, Google TV Ads will be able to "provide an order of magnitude of improved accountability for advertisers," thanks to the 'granularity' of the TiVo data.

While Mike Steib, the Google director of emerging platforms, has described the deal as means to a more effective measurement of television; Gartner Research VP Andrew Frank is of the opinion that Google's team-up with TiVo clearly indicates that the Web search giant has several ways to grow alongside the Internet.