Interesting article on content based advertising. Gil Elbaz of applied Semantics claims that “the very fact that search engine algorithms remain largely keyword-based means that they aren’t particularly sophisticated in learning what a page is “about.” I think this is optimistic. Google have the expertise to develop a concept based approach, possibly using intellectual property gained through their acquisition of Outride, but they certainly need to get their act together here or text ads advertising Hummers from suvssuck.com aren’t going to be that impressive. This is particularly important when you consider the following: “While clickthrough rates might indeed be lower, Google claims that their tests show that post-click behavior (conversions to sales) resulting from content-targeted ads is similar to that seen with search engine advertising.”

One good thing to come out of consolidation in the search space is the general realization that Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company with an excellent brand. It is another advertising company, Overture, that has bought some of the main search engines, not the other way around. Search technology is a commodity and subtleties like PageRank are icing on a cake that others have the recipe for. The main issue with search from a technical perspective is scalability and, as FAST has shown, Google is not the only one to have figured this out.