The Official Google Blog gives a comprehensive explanation of why the search giant bought ad serving company, DoubleClick.

“Google and DoubleClick play different but complementary roles in online advertising. Google primarily sells ads, and DoubleClick delivers (serves) ads. The relationship between Google and DoubleClick is analogous to the relationship between Amazon.com and Federal Express. Amazon.com makes money by selling a book to the consumer. Federal Express makes money by delivering it to the consumer.

“In summary, we’re buying DoubleClick because:

1. DoubleClick’s products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.
2. Historically, we’ve not allowed third parties to serve into Google’s AdSense network, which has made it hard for advertisers to get performance metrics. Together, Google and DoubleClick can deliver a more open platform for advertisers, and provide the metrics they need to manage marketing campaigns.
3. By combining Google’s infrastructure with DoubleClick’s knowledge of agencies and publishers, we can create the next generation of more innovative ad serving technology, one that significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising.
4. To manage ad inventory, some of the largest publishers use DoubleClick DART for Publishers – but a good portion of it goes unsold. It’s our view that the combination of DoubleClick and Google will help these publishers succeed by monetizing their unsold inventory.

Go here to see the rest of this informative article.

Internet advertising is increasing rapidly on all measures. A need is developing for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big-Ad Lite service. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. […] Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a search engine with human intervention. It’s still in alpha so we must wait awhile before testing it properly.

The press release FAQ asks if Mahalo is seen as a threat to Google :

“Is this a Google killer? Nothing is going to ‘kill’ Google in my estimation. Google has an amazing search product and the world’s most efficient advertising infrastructure. We plan on partnering with Google for these services just like I did at Weblogs, Inc., AOL and Netscape. That being said, head-to-head Mahalo’s human-powered search results will be much better than Google’s machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo! for long-tail searches. ”

I searched for Syntagma and yes, it was in there. We came 2nd and 3rd on the list, below Syntagma Square, Athens, but above all the other companies called Syntagma.

What then is the idea behind the human operators? This is from the press release :

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?

Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP? It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

This is an interesting concept and it will be good to watch it mature. Try it out for yourself.

There’s a useful roundup of Google Apps over on the Official Google website.

“As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we’re focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways.”

They now offer email, calendaring, document creation and collaboration services for individuals, and with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can “customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems”.

It seems more than 100,000 organizations of all sizes have started using Google Apps to deliver “powerful services to employees, students and members”. The great advantage is that there’s no hardware or software to install or maintain.

The site gives info clicks for four institutional categories : small business, enterprise, school, and Family and Group.

Read the rest of the piece.