Here’s the formal language: “The Company recorded a $275 million pre-tax charge for the impairment of goodwill related to the Digital Media Group and an organizational restructuring at MySpace.”

Translation: Firing people en masse, as we did at Myspace last quarter, is expensive. Also, we’re writing down a lot of the social networking company’s remaining value.

I’ve asked News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) for more clarity on the charge: How much of it stems from layoffs? How much of it comes from a writedown on Myspace’s value? And were any other assets involved? At this point the company’s Digital Media Group is pretty much just Myspace, but it does have other stuff there, most notably its IGN site.

It’s worth noting that during today’s unveiling of the Daily, the company’s iPad newspaper, CEO Rupert Murdoch said that the company had already written down the first $30 million it had invested in the project. So it’s entirely possible that that figure is part of the $275 million.

More if I get it. And I”ll be back at 4:30 pm ET to cover News Corp.’s earnings call live.

UPDATE: For the record, News Corp.’s $275 million charge on its digital operations, announced today, breaks down this way: $107 million of that is for restructuring, and the remaining $168 million is a writedown, presumably focused on Myspace.

And for those who care–costs for the Daily are being assigned to News Corp.’s publishing group: $7 million of the $30 million it has spent so far were assigned to this quarter.

In a surprisingly quick and even stealthy move, AOL has renewed and expanded its search agreement with Google, even though many had expected there to be more-competitive bidding throughout the fall to win the deal.

The five-year partnership to provide search technology and search advertising by powering AOL Search is more wide-ranging than the one it replaces, also including improved search products, global search, mobile search and also a video-distribution arrangement with YouTube, which could evolve over time to include content partnerships.

“We have tried to make a deal that has 100 percent alignment on what we each do best,” said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong in an interview last night with Boomtown. “At the end of the day, Google checked all the boxes.”

The search partnership between AOL (AOL) and Google (GOOG)–the third since 2002 actually–was set to run out December 19.

Thus, AOL had been talking for months with a number of new partner possibilities, especially with Microsoft (MSFT) about using its Bing search service for AOL.

Microsoft has been trying to improve its market share with the innovative Bing and has made great strides.

But, despite a valiant effort so far, it is still the No. 3 search engine, with about 11 percent of the market share, according to the latest comScore (SCOR) report for July, compared to 66 percent for Google and 17 percent for Yahoo (YHOO).

Adding AOL would have been a plus for Microsoft, since it has a 2.3 percent share.

But Armstrong said a deal was worked out early once AOL got what it wanted from Google, which certainly had the inside track in terms of experience in working with AOL.

Nonetheless, AOL had started the process of re-evaluating who it would pick to serve its search needs late last summer and had planned for a process to last closer to when the Google deal expired.

In April, Armstrong said, AOL re-engaged with all potential partners worldwide, which he said numbered a half-dozen.

He declined to name them, but sources said the other companies included Yahoo, as well as China’s Baidu.

The talks with Google were turbocharged when Armstrong–who, ironically, was one of the key Google execs who negotiated the first AOL deal, when he headed U.S. ad sales there–met with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the Allen & Co. conference earlier this summer in Sun Valley, Idaho.

The deal moved quickly after that, with Armstrong wanting AOL to get access to the search innovation pipeline at Google, rather than just receive a more basic product.

He would not say if Google guaranteed search ad revenues in the deal, but sources said it has similar terms to the previous deal, which did include them.

The video part of the deal puts AOL content more prominently on YouTube and presumably it will be better programmed. AOL and Google will share ad revenue on the premium videos.

The mobile details are still being worked out, but will likely be served via Google’s mobile technology from its AdMob acquisition.

Armstrong admitted Google had the advantage from the start, especially since it knew how AOL Search performed, although early talks between the companies were initially rocky.

Perhaps that was due to the massive writedown in 2009 of the $1 billion investment Google–a key part of its previous search deal–had made in 2005 for a five percent stake in AOL, when it was still owned by Time Warner (TWX).

Armstrong also noted he wanted to avoid a lot of attention and uncertainty a bidding war would surely create.

“We had a no-drama policy on this,” said Armstrong. “And, as it turned out, this was not a single, not a double, not a triple, but a home run for us.”

Here is a detail-free–with promise of more to come–8-K filing AOL submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission on its new deal with the Silicon Valley search behemoth:

AOLInc

Here is the official press release on the new Google-AOL deal:

AOL AND GOOGLE RENEW AND EXPAND GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and NEW YORK, NY–September 2, 2010–Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) today announced a five-year renewal and expansion of one of the largest and longest-standing partnerships in Internet history. The global alliance, which has at its core Google’s provision of search services to AOL’s content network and properties, in exchange for a revenue-sharing arrangement between AOL and Google, will be expanded to include mobile search and YouTube.

“Today is another important step in the turnaround of AOL,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “AOL users will be getting a better search and search ads experience from the best search company in the world–Google. After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

“We’re excited to deepen our partnership. This agreement combines Google’s expertise in search and advertising with AOL’s strength in online content,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Google. “It’s particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users’ online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses.”

The partnership includes a broad range of features that will improve and expand the products and services offered to consumers.

· Search Products: Google will provide AOL with additional features and enhancement to its leading Web search products that will improve the consumer search experience across AOL’s network of sites.

· Advertising Products: Google will provide AOL with best-in-class ad formats, giving AOL consumers a better, more relevant ad experience.

· Mobile Search: As AOL renews its focus on mobile apps and content, the companies will work together to expand the alliance to cover mobile search.

· YouTube: AOL and YouTube have agreed to a content partnership that will bring AOL’s video content to YouTube.

· Global Focus: The alliance is international in scope and will provide improved experiences to AOL’s worldwide audience.

Last week, Time Warner (TWX) announced a $25 billion write-down. Now NBC Universal’s parent company, GE (GE), may be looking at one of its own, courtesy of Vivendi, which owns a 20 percent stake in the broadcast network/movie studio/cable TV outfit.

Vivendi will be writing down the value of its equity, which it acquired in 2004. A spokeswoman quoted in a Dow Jones piece says the write-down  will be “lower than the EUR2.3 billion [$3.1 billion] gain the company booked in the third quarter from the creation of Activision Blizzard Inc,” which leaves an awful lot of wriggle room.

As recently as last November, Vivendi’s stake was supposedly worth somewhere in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, which implies a value of of $30 billion to $40 billion for the entire unit. But Vivendi and GE disagree about the value of the NBCU, and the two companies have a complicated relationship, with competing put/call options in the stake.

NBCU reported operating income of $3.1 billion on revenue of $15.4 billion in 2007. Through the first nine months of 2008, the unit had posted operating income of $2.3 billion on $12.5 billion; those numbers included a big boost from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For instance, in 2002, Time Warner had to take a $54 billion write-down connected to its disastrous AOL deal. Today, the company has announced a $25 billion write-down, which is in part connected to… its disastrous AOL deal.

To be fair, most of that charge has nothing to do with AOL, but with problems in its cable business; spin-out company Time Warner Cable (TWC) announced a $15 billion write-down of its own. But while Time Warner doesn’t elaborate on the charges in its release–it just says they are “related to goodwill and identifiable intangible assets at the Cable, Publishing and AOL segments”–I’m told that some of the write-down does indeed relate to the original AOL deal from eight years ago.

Other problems at Time Warner aren’t of its own making: The company says it will also take a hit of $50 million to $60 million from a “restructuring of a lease for space in the Time & Life Building, held by a lessee who recently declared bankruptcy.” That tenant, I’m told, was Lehman Brothers.

In any case, as astonishing as these numbers look in print, they don’t have much to do with Time Warner’s performance as a company, in the present tense. But Time Warner had worrisome news on that front, too: “The economic environment has proved somewhat more challenging than the Company previously expected, particularly for the advertising businesses at the AOL and Publishing segments.” Sigh.

The memory chip company posted revenue of $1.45 billion, below the Street consensus at $1.54 billion. The company lost $344 million in the quarter, including a $205 million write-down of inventory and work in progress, offset by a gain of $70 million for price adjustments for NAND products purchased from other suppliers in prior periods. Before those items, the company lost $209 million, or 27 cents a share; the Street had expected a loss of 23 cents a share.

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