Google has announced the launch of "Interest-based" advertising as a beta test for the company’s partner sites and on YouTube. In other words, Google will be serving ads based on sites users visit.

When dealing with Google AdWords campaigns, advertisers have several options for selecting keywords. PPC expert and Founder of ClickEquations Craig Danuloff talked with me about when to use each one, and provided some advice about getting the most out of your campaign on a limited budget.

Chris Crum: When should advertisers use Exact Match?

Google News has apparently grown from using 4,500 sources to 25,000 sources over the course of a year. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable noticed that the number below the search box on the Google News homepage has grown pretty significantly.

Google is now showing ads on Google News search results pages in the U.S. Basically, you’ll just be seeing AdWords off to the right when you enter queries, just as you would with a regular Google Search.

Google is implementing a change in its URL policy for AdWords. Starting the week of February 24, all display URLs within an ad group must have the same top-level domain.

It appears that television advertising is following a different trend than many have expected. Advertising Age is citing data from a recent study (due out soon) from Nielsen indicating that its doing better than ever. Some may find this a bit surprising with the increasing popularity of DVRs and online video.

Google has crafted several new videos to help users better understand the process of creating display ads using Google AdWords. They’ve had two videos on the process since October, but have now released four more.

The first one is simply on accessing the feature in AdWords in the first place:

Google’s Inside AdWords Crew is talking about a new model for traffic estimation using Google Ad Planner. They say it will help reduce confusion around tracking the number of unique visors to your site.

So what does this entail exactly? According to the Inside AdWords blog, they:

Google has partnered with SpotMixer to launch a self-service video ad creation solution within the Google TV Ads platform. This is a very cool concept that should be huge for small businesses with tight advertising budgets. Basically, you create a ready-for-television commercial all on your own.

Below overview checks which Google products directly make money for Google in terms of being paid for by the user, or having ads or affiliate links. Indirect effects on revenues (as well as some other things) are disregarded for this purpose, but not because the effects are necessarily neglible.* The table is just an estimate – if you see ommissions or misses please comment and I’ll update the table.

Google seems to be offering beta testing of a new AdWords budgeting feature called "Timeframe," which allows users to choose between monthly and daily budgeting.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says the beta testing has been confirmed, and points to a WebmasterWorld thread that includes a response from an official Google representative:

A maintenance process this Saturday!

Yes, this is the official announcement from the Google Team about a maintenance process, this Saturday. The AdWords login console and the API will be offline between 10am and 2pm Pacific Time.

“We’ll be performing routine system maintenance on Saturday, January 10 from approximately 10:00am to 2:00pm PST. You won’t be able to access AdWords or the API during this time frame, but your ads will continue to run as normal.” -Jeffrey Posnick, AdWords API Team.

Last week, Google used its Google Moderator product to call upon users to give them ideas for improving Google Mobile. It allowed people to submit ideas and vote others up or down. This would give Google an idea of the ones that were most in demand.

Back in October, when Google offered some tips for the then-upcoming holiday season, they suggested using Google Checkout badges in your AdWords ads. They said that ads that do this have a 10% higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t.

Even as we approach the end of 2008, click fraud is still something that needs to be dealt with in the search engine advertising industry. Google takes a number of precautions to keep it under control though.

Google has released AdWords Editor version 7.0, a mere two months after 6.5 came out as Barry Schwartz points out at Search Engine Land. Google did not make any major announcements about the release, but just kind of put it out there, and we have not yet seen much in the way of user reactions.

Times are tight. Heck, college professors are having to sell ad space on exam pages to make up for budget cuts. It would make sense that Google would increase the number of ads on its search pages, too, except it’s hard to forget certain executive speeches about fewer ads with better targeting.

Google has gone and made some revisions to its policy for alcohol ads for AdWords. You might recall that they were not allowing alcohol ads, but then around Halloween, they began permitting beer, champagne, and wine ads.

Google said today that AdWords will now be available on the iPhone and on the T-Mobile G1 along with other mobile devices that have full HTML browsers.

Google TV Ads opens up AdWords user accounts to real television advertising opportunities, and the list of channels available through this program continues to grow. So far Google already had six networks from NBC Universal including Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller, as well as  Bloomberg Television and 96 networks through DISH Network.

If the Internet consisted of real brick and mortar buildings there would be a construction boom going on right now like the world has never seen. The Internet is not in a recession or on the road to a depression, rather it is experiencing an economic and social explosion of activity.