It’s not new for search engines to advertise on other search engines. We
wrote about Live.com doing that on Google
earlier this year,
and that was just the latest in a long line of examples over the years. But
we’ve never heard of a search engine advertising for those seeking another
search engine on a third search engine until now.
The screenshot above explains it all. It’s a search for yahoo.com
on Google, bringing up an ad from Ask.com. Ask — going after Yahoo users who
are searching for Yahoo at Google.
It’s a pretty popular query, actually. I
wrote recently about
how Yahoo is one of the most popular search terms on Google, even above some of
the terms that were originally mistakenly reported by Google as the most popular
last year. More recently, Yahoo
was even found to
have more queries that perennial top search “sex” on Google.
It is odd that these ads don’t show in the US. Someone tipped us to the ad
after spotting it
in Germany, and I can see it in the UK. But in the US, it’s not showing.
This is a good time to remind people how to see ads targeted to various
countries. To do this, simply add:
&gl=COUNTRYCODE
The country code is a two digit combination for a particular country. The UK
code works like this:
The two letter country codes can be found
here,
and more information about country targeting can also be found
here
from Google.