Google has seen hyperactive growth almost since its initial launch with a simple and cute interface that had an uncanny ability to find what its users were looking for. Now that search advertising is becoming a mature market, shareholders are pressuring Google to find the next goldmine.

One possibility is for Google to expand advertising displayed on its own web properties and in particular, the company is exploring ways to monetize its image search feature. Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google told Bloomberg Radio that the company estimated in 2006 it was “giving up as much as $200 million a year by not including text advertisements with its image search results.”

Tests incorporating text ads with image searches drove people away from the image search feature and Google took that trend as a serious warning. Some sort of illustrated display ad may fit better alongside image results, at least that’s what Google is hoping.

That hope is a large part of drive behind Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., which allows customer to manage display ads. “DoubleClick’s strength in display advertising and their work in brand advertising we think ultimately may mean we’ll have a better set of options in terms of image ads to run on image search,” Mayer said.

Google will have to be careful though, that it doesn’t gain DoubleClick’s reputation for acting like spyware. According to Wikipedia:

DoubleClick is often linked with the controversy over spyware because browser HTTP cookies are set to track users as they travel from website to website and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. According to a San Francisco IT consulting group, although DoubleClick does offer an opt-out page, this only affects cookies; DoubleClick continues to track users via IP addresses.

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 11:13 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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