Google and other search engines changing the focus of advertising

In Google’s mission statement one of their objectives entails “providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page.” It goes further to mention that by doing so it makes advertising useful for the consumer as well as the advertiser. By providing psycholographical information and allowing companies to allocate their ads directly to the consumer, do search engines conserve economic costs that would have been wasted on the uninterested consumer?

Related resources:

 Google’s Mission Statement. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html on March 31, 2008.

Van Couvering, E. (2004). New media? The political economy of Internet search engines. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Media & Communications Researchers, Porto Alegre, Brazil.