EBay and Google Give Each Other the Peace Sign

When eBay ran a 10-day test to see if online shoppers can still find what they want in the most popular online store, Google was not pleased since it involved having to pull out all the advertising from the said search engine.

Considering that eBay is one of the biggest buyers that uses Google's AdWords marketing program, and left with a serious rift between to of Silicon Valley's most prolific online companies.

Hani Durzy, eBay's spokesman said that (they) didn't need to spend too much on Google ads, which items can still be pinpointed on Google's standard search results. Traffic to the site was higher during its 10-day experiment compared with the same time a year ago, and eBay sales don't appear to have been dampened.

"Other partners -- Yahoo and AOL and MSN -- really stepped up and provided a lot of value," Durzy said. "And natural search continues to drive a lot of valuable traffic to the site."

Of course, Google spokesman Brandon McCormick confirmed that eBay returned to AdWords on Friday afternoon.

"Over the last seven years, we have worked closely with eBay to drive customers to their site and build value for their business and the business of their sellers," McCormick wrote in an e-mail. "We look forward to a continued partnership."

Whether it was all "sour grapes" that may have caused it when eBay hosted an annual user celebration last June 14, among the guests are Google's executives and seems to try taking the spotlight. If that didn't stop there, eBay somewhat "retaliated", coincidentally at the wrong place at the right time, pulling their ads from Google for the next 10 days.

If it were a conspiracy in the works, eBay claims that they were planning this for months prior to their annual user's party, possibly because they own PayPal, a popular online payments website, and they don't want Google Checkout to get the upper hand on things. EBay acquired PayPal in 2002 and an important factor in their ever-increasing profit margin that caters to nearly 150 million sellers and buyers all over the world.