The FT reports on a recent analysts meeting where Google executives were confident about the advances being made to their advertising system, which will move them further away from Yahoo! and Microsoft. This prediction comes after the recent announcement of quarterly profit gains, where the 'monetisation' - the amount of advertising revenue it generates from each search - is still growing.

Google claims that "the quality of ads is still quite low" so that there is still room for further improvements in serving up relevant messages to the searcher. One sign of this is that Google recently reduced the number of adverts being displayed alongside its search results to try to weed out the least relevant messages. This means that there is a large volume of unsold search inventory available that Google believes it could make money on as it reached more specialised and local advertisers.

This is very much a financial viewpoint served up for investors, yet Google says that it had built a bigger team of specialists in the past year to develop and test potential improvements to its advertising. Due to these resources, they had been able to make 20 separate improvements to its search advertising system during the third quarter of this year, compared with only “two or three” in the same period a year before.

At the same time, MediaPost reports on the announcement by Google that they are working on a marketing 'dashboard' that will enable advertisers to integrate and track data across different ad formats, such as search, display and offline campaigns. No timing was given for this launch, but the expected finalisation of the DoubleClick acquisition is sure to move this along and present advertisers with a more extensive suite of tools and resources available from Google.