It's hard to imagine a Web without onramps like search engines these days. They've become an essential part of the online experience. It may be equally as hard to imagine what the next phase of online advertising will be, as used to the sponsored links as we are.



That maybe part of the problem. Ad-blindness generally becomes the necessity of ad invention. Even as Google slays the competition in the search ad sector and takes in 40 percent higher profits quarter after quarter, there must be something to the company's (and its competitors') willingness to dole out heaps of cash for ad display companies and prime real estate like YouTube.

Google did, after all, start weaving video into AdSense, and overlaying ads on YouTube.

So there may be (okay, there is) some credibility to Microsoft's belief that the bulk of online ad spending in the near future will steer away from keyword advertisements. But again it is still hard to imagine too much of that bulk being redirected.

My teenager at home, Internet-savvy as he is, still uses the Google search bar to find YouTube and Wikipedia – even though I've fussed at him repeatedly to just type in the URL. He's a good representative of the average surfer – the journey begins with a search engine.

Even then, and even though Google has prided itself (in the days of moving upwards from launch to national conscience) on its clean, unobtrusive interface with text ads tucked neatly to the sides or differentiated up top in the prime real estate area.

But don't count on it staying that way. It's not clear what Sergey Brin meant by "the convergent optimizer" that will be launched from beta-testing, but here is the context in which it is delivered, courtesy of Tiernan Ray:

Co-founder Sergey Brin talked about a new initiative rolling out this quarter, called the “convergent optimizer,” currently in beta-testing. (Sounds spooky.) It will allow ad clients to bid on how much a Web user is worth to them, and then Google will figure the math of how much that client should spend to buy a keyword. Brin said the company was seeing higher click-through rates than expected for ads it has been placing at the bottom of YouTube videos.

The mention of YouTube in that report is telling. Surfers are again blind to online advertising -- just as we ignore banners, we've learned to ignore the right column as well as the ads above the search listings, even on webpages where we think ads are supposed to be.

Call it Google-operant-conditioning. And, as my teenager shows, it's difficult to unlearn bad habits. In order to be noticed, online advertising will have to converge. Microsoft knows it, Google knows it.

But it won't replace search. Search is the starting line. Online ads will be adapting and changing, though, to catch the searcher in the SERPs, in the social network, the video site, the blog, wherever the searcher ends up after they've searched.       

Google Microsoft online advertising search adverting