Contextual Advertising is a program in which advertisers’ paid listing appears on web sites containing content relevant to the listings. It’s another method of distributing paid listings by search engines as opposed to the traditional means of inserting them into search results. In traditional search, advertisers choose relevant keywords and then bid on them.

Searchers enter queries, and if the advertiser has chosen that keyword, then the ad is shown. This creates a one to one matching which is straightforward to monitor and optimize. This process is different for the contextual advertising. Here, the engine analyzes advertiser’s entire keyword list and ad text in an ad group, assigns a theme to that ad group and then matches this theme to sites in its network.

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Contextual advertising according to www.webopedia.com is advertising on a Web site that is targeted to the specific individual who is visiting the Web site. A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a site about sports, and the site uses contextual advertising, then user might see ads for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers.

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Web Search is constantly evolving. First generation search analyzed words on the page to rank content, second generation search tapped into link analysis and today search is becoming more personalized and specialized. By combining horizontal search, where the user searches a wide spectrum of material, and vertical search, where the user searches only through one topic area, the search engines are blending listings from their news, video, images, maps and other databases together onto one page. Google’s new Universal Search unifies all these different offerings by including links, where appropriate, to the standard Web results. All those listings, which were previously available only through the One Box displays and weren’t utilized by most users, limiting the scope of their results, are presented now on one page. The move ensures that the users receive all relevant content, by expanding the number of databases they are searching behind the scenes.

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