Citysearch and Overture today announced an agreement in which Citysearch will integrate Overture’s contextually targeted keyword advertising into various local search channels. Overture, owned by Yahoo, will target regional advertising via its keyword targeting and also in Citysearch search listings under the heading of “Sponsored Results.”
The competition to put their regional and keyword/context advertising on display has really heated up recently as Yahoo’s Overture and Google are both trying to corner their respected markets in search engine advertising.
Google stepped up their efforts yesterday by also integrating banner ads in the AdWords advertising network. In what used to only be a market for contextually targeted keyword text ads, Google is now giving its AdWords advertisers the option of running banners to test results. Google’s AdWords ads are shown on partnered web sites such as Lycos and About.com, along with the Google AdSense network of middle tier website publishers.
In other search engine distribution contract news, Yahoo Search is now powering the search results on CNN web properties. Previously powered by Google, Yahoo Search was chosen to be the search engine of choice over the CNN web network- which also has a search/contextual advertising contract running with Yahoo’s Overture.
