Google strives to be recognised as an innovative organisation. This is evident from Google's many acquisitions of companies and technologies that are considered exciting or groundbreaking. The search engine giant quickly incorporates the new service into an already extensive list of offerings.

In-text contextual advertisements is seen occasionally, but hasn't yet appeared to have taken off. At the moment, AdSense carries Google's contextual advertisements. AdSense scans through content on a page and then matches it to relevant advertisers who use its flagship advertising product, AdWords. Presently, the service uses ad blocks, banner ads or links which are displayed on the page. Nevertheless, these are not the only types of contextual advertising. In-text contextual advertising, sometimes called content linking or contextual linking, is the linking of keywords or phrases within page content to relevant advertisers based on those keywords.

Few companies actually offer in-text contextual advertising, and unfortunately most are connected to adware - software that is designed to infiltrate a computer, install itself and then automatically display advertisements. However, in-text contextual linking can be used both in an ethical and profitable way; so Google just might consider acquiring a company or developing a service themselves.

Adding the new service would be a fairly simple process. A web developer or site owner could register for it and just like AdSense, a block of JavaScript code on the page would allow Google to scan and highlight words. Additionally advertisers already using AdWords could sign up for this new service. The pay-per-click advertising process is mirrored and these links can help drive traffic to advertisers' sites. The site owners receive a percentage of the fee based on the number of clicks or impressions generated. So long as this is done by JavaScript, no link value is passed on and the process cannot be viewed as unethical.

This new form of marketing opens up a whole new range of advertising options to search engine marketers. Leveraging the vast amount of traffic to high quality blogs provides advertisers with an untapped market. Even so, online marketing firms are still sceptical of this method at the moment, especially since links are not clearly marked as advertisements. Here's where Google's innovative expertise will shine through. It could clearly redefine the process, iron out the flaws and thus, make it easy for advertisers to reap the benefits.