This appeared on Google.com when I performed a search for “Liberals.” Don’t ask why I did that. To my surprise, I saw this single eBay ad.

Why would eBay want to sell their liberals? Are there too many in inventory? Do liberals constitute a high profit margin?

None of the above. It turns out that eBay is using a Google’s DKI to insert keywords into AdWords ads. Kevin Lee, writing for ClickZ, explained it this way:

Google has an automated method to allow you to have the searcher’s keywords inserted into your ad (assuming the keyword string isn’t too long to fit). The Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) system uses a creative template and keeps all the other ad copy the same.

I wonder what other interesting automated ads we’ll see this election season.

I’m feeling pretty good now. Besides having about 10 days off work, I just got a Christmas present from Google. I seem to have just passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam. Not bad for a guy who spends day and night working on nothing but organic search, right? Pat, pat, pat… Amazing what can be done with a little holiday leisure time. Honestly, I am fairly new to paid search so the exam just might be too easy if I can pass. Most of what little I know about AdWords came from doing the Google online practice exams, studying with friends and from Andrew Goodman’s excellent book, Winning Results with Google AdWords. I am thankful that the company I work for was gracious enough to sponsor me.

The last certification exam I took was many Google updates ago, the CIW Site Designer exam. Like before, Prometric Online Testing administered the exam, but not from testing center. The Google Advertising Professional exam can be conveniently passed or failed from your home pc and without a suspicious test administrator watching over you with a stick.

Merry Christmas All!

Where did you want to have gone today? MSN Search users like myself who wanted to go to a search engine results page were greeted with an error message stating that MSN Search service was currently unavailable and that the team was working to restore the service as soon as possible. Others seemed to have noticed the outage and wondered at the revenue loss. Later, I saw that major news sites were reporting the outage and MSNBC’s sub title “Microsoft says it’s still trying to figure out what went wrong” appeared. For the sake of competition in the marketplace benefitting searchers and webmaster, I truly hope that MSN Search as well as Yahoo Search will be able to show themselves to be stronger competitors with Google.