• Financial Times, Thursday, October 25, 2007 10:47 AM

Google's annual analyst day was sabotaged somewhat by the announcement that the company lost out in its bid for a stake in Facecbook to Microsoft, but the company did make predictions on Google's future. Riding high from last week's news that Google recently made even bigger gains in search advertising monetization, Nick Fox, the company's director of advertising product management, declared: "There is still substantial headroom" in eking out more money from Google's existing user base. A paramount concern for the company is improving the relevancy of its search and contextual ads.

To improve the quality advertising, Google slashed the number of ads it shows inside search results in an attempt "to weed out the least relevant messages," leaving a larger volume of unsold search inventory, which Google plans to sell to more relevant local advertisers.

The search giant added that it's built a larger team of specialists in the past year to enhance its search advertising system. In the last quarter alone, Google says the team made 20 improvements to the system, compared with only two or three over the same period the year before.

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