If I told you that Pauly Shore had (somewhat) recently made his best movie ever, you might not run out and get it. After all, in the minds of many people, the “best Pauly Shore movie” is a pretty low bar to jump, for obvious reasons – a long, secret campaign by jealous actors to ensure that Encino Man and Bio Dome (co-starting Steven Baldwin, natch) never get the critical acclaim they are due. Or, er, people just don’t like the whole “caveman in a high school” theme and find his movies rather silly.

Whatever, it doesn’t matter – what matters is that AOL has acquired Quigo, and I believe it is a pretty shrewd move for AOL, which if you’ve followed AOL’s recent past, outside of tricking Time Warner into one of the biggest mistakes in business history, is seen by many as a pretty low bar to jump indeed.

But this is not a backhand compliment – we’ve been monitoring Quigo for a long time, and it’s got an interesting position relative to the Google and Facebook ad networks that everyone is talking about. To see one of the main reasons why this is, the best thing to do is check out Google news in relation to the Quigo announcement – it’s basically a single story, with a link to “all 207 news articles” on the subject.

That looks a heck of a lot like commoditization (or near commoditization, or something else that’s not good either) for about 206 of the companies, websites and writers publishing those articles. In turn, many of these companies might be a little resistant to locking in ad relationships with an intermediary that’s slowly killing them through a monstorous news aggregation site.

At the same time, Google’s ad network has remained mostly blind – companies bid on key words, ads pop up all over the place, and in many cases advertisers have no idea where that will be (and a curiously large number of sites continue to advertise discount mortgages in the wierdest places).

While this is a problem on many fronts, among these is that well-branded content sites do not neccesarily recieve the premium they deserve for their ad space, nor is (say) their demographic targeting optimized. At the same time, Google kind of jams itself in there and takes over the advertising relationship entirely – which, again, pushes certain sites that much closer to commoditization.

Just think about it for a second – Google simutaneously taking over the advertising network, making it blind for most other participants, controlling search, and becoming a key news aggregator site, in addition to taking over the world with various other initiatives up to and including OpenSocial. If you were a media property, would you want to be cozying up to them?

Quigo’s been, for lack of a better term, a little more “white label” than Google, and a whole lot more like a partner for many media properties than a threat. In turn, while many people may not recognize the Quigo name, they might recognize some key customers: USA Today, Disney (and ESPN, ABC), Fodor’s, Hollywood.com, Fox News, NyDailyNews, TheStreet.com, and others.

Speaking of TheStreet.com, Jim Cramer has apparently come out on that site and called Quigo the Google killer – which is of course nuts, because Google is not going to be “killed” anytime soon. But Cramer indicates he evaluated both the Quigo and Google platforms, and says the former is better.

Now it’s by no means certain that this move will work for AOL, and there is a bit of a sense of desperation to it – I think the article titled AOL: Let’s become an Ad Network before this really unravels sums up that POV nicely. Quigo’s going to be jammed in with other recent advertising acquisitions including Third Screen Media, AdTech AG, and Tacoda, into Platform A… oh who really knows what they are doing. Moreover, there’s a very good chance AOL could mess up what Quigo has got going – but at minimum, it’s an interesting story to watch.

Speaking of watching stories, I might as well admit now that I’m a bit of a closet Pauly Shore fan dating all the way back to the Son in Law days. Check out his website, it really is kind of cool, and if your sense of humor is a bit off (in a good way) Pauly Shore is Dead might just be worth catching (if you missed it the first time around).