There could hardly be a more quixotic business plan for a startup than to tackle Google, the colossus of Web search and online advertising. Hopeful rivals have struggled in vain for years to steal some of its market share. Even giant competitors such as Yahoo! and Microsoft continue to lose ground to the King of Search.

Still, the expanded odds don’t discourage ambitious entrepreneurs convinced they have a better mousetrap. The latest startup to grab attention is Munich-based Proximic, founded in 2001 by Thomas Nitsche, a German mathematician and his business partner, Philipp Pieper, an World Wide Web entrepreneur. On Jan. 16, Proximic announced a breakthrough deal to supply its search technology to Yahoo! Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com.

Pinpointing the Geography of Advertising

Both of the e-commerce sites will harness Proximic’s patent-pending pattern matching technology to deliver advertisements by the Net that Proximic says are better suited to the context in which they’re placed than anything Google can

equal today. whether the deals pan out, Proximic could be rocketed from obscurity to an outsized role in greasing the wheels of online commerce.

The terms of the relationships are just emerging. Yahoo Shopping and Shopping.com both maintain huge catalogs of items for sale that are difficult to find — on an individual basis — through conventional online search advertising. Thus, a Net surfer reading an exposition on weed-whackers might be shown a general ad delivered via Google’s Adsense network for lawn-care products — but not an offer for a specific grade of trimmers available at a nearby garden store.

By entrusting their online catalogs to Proximic’s indexing technology, Yahoo Shopping and Shopping.com will supply the German startup with an stock of 50 million individual items, each of which could become a context-specific ad served up alongside online subject matter. Proximic says by comparison, Google’s Adsense has an stock of…

Orginal post by Top Tech News