During a recent keynote speech by Nicholas Fox, Business Product Management Director for Google AdWords , a new direction in search engine advertising was suggested. Speaking at the 2009 SES San Jose conference Mr Fox informed the audience  that Search Engine users are getting more creative in expressing their queries making it harder for Google to match the query with the relevant ad.

Although there are currently only half a million words in the Oxford English dictionary, there are about 30 million keywords in Google’s ad database.

20% of these daily queries , haven’t been seen before in the last 3 months which suggests there is still room for improvement in the method of connecting users to the relevant products and services.  “I see the keyword as an intermediary that we came up with five or ten years ago, to help advertisers target specific queries,” he said.

Google’s answer to this problem seems to be a much more integrated system where as advertisers wouldn’t plug in keywords themselves but would simply submit their ‘service’ description or a product catalog and Google will figure it out themselves automatically.

Developments in search using image recognition were being made, an area that Google will most likely continue to invest in.

There has been a number of highly significant developments in the world of search over the last few weeks and months. The commercial tie up between two of the major players in the industry, MSN and Yahoo has created Bing.com. Jeeves the butler is back in favour at a newly revamped askjeeves.com and Wolfram Alph’s “computational knowledge engine” was lauched to much fanfare (www.wolframalpha.com).

Google meanwhile have not been standing around with their hands in their pockets. They have an answer to the pretenders to the crown of number one in search and it currently has the peculiar name of ‘Caffine’. Read more here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8195739.stm