Ah the eighties. Remember the good old “cola wars”? Well the marketing war being waged today is far beyond the likes of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Welcome to the search engine wars. The search engine wars, however, have moved past including only the likes of Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The latest saga in the search engine wars involves Google and a non-search engine, Ebay.

Apparently, the ongong feud between Google and Ebay has hit the tipping point, with Ebay announcing today that it has pulled all of its advertising from the Google AdWords program. This action comes after Google threw a party during the Ebay Live conference in Boston earlier this week, possibly in the hopes of luring away customers. The crux of the issue seems to be that Google Checkout directly competes now with Ebay’s Paypal system.

As the debate over paid links continues in reaction to Google’s recent line in the sand it may shock many that Google is currently offering paid links on Google.com for the very reasonable price of just $1,995 – and as an added bonus you’ll also receive a free Google Mini.

Yesterday while digging through a competitor’s backlinks for a client I noticed a domain that seemed remarkably out of place: google.com. In addition to adding themselves to a large number of low quality directories, the competitor had discovered that if you purchase the Google Mini you have the privilege of contributing to their exceedingly large list of “customer success stories“. While many of these success stories are for established and recognizable businesses who sincerely appreciate the advanced search capabilities the Mini provides, others are undoubtedly as pleased with their new link as their new Google Mini.

I am at the Internet Retailer Conference in San Jose, CA this week along with 4,000 other e-tailers. Here are some thoughts from the first day.

Jim McCann, founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers, gave the keynote address. Closing in on $1 billion in annual sales, 1-800-Flowers has aggressively acquired other companies in past years and expanded far outside flowers into other gift products such as candy and wine. According to Internet Retailer, that growth has been expensive, and all is not good within the company. I find that easy to believe. McCann filled his 30 minutes with bad jokes and very little substance. He was either trying very hard to keep the company strategy under wraps or he does not have a company strategy. I suspect the latter. He ended his talk with a rather bizarre plea for help from the audience. No thank you–if I figure out a better way to sell flowers online, I do not feel like sharing it with Jim McCann. I would rather start a flower company.

eMarketer reports that online advertising spending is on the rise in China and Russia.

China

Last year, online advertising generated over $500 million in revenues, up 54% over 2005′s revenues. With news like that, you’d think online adveritising would have a corner on the market, but television advertising spending was still 56 times that of online ad spending, for at least five months of last year.

eMarketer says that this growth is fueled in large part by the ever-growing Chinese population. They also cited Nielsen//NetRatings as saying that 81% of Chinese advertising dollars renminbi goes to television, newspaper and magazine advertising.

Russia

Ask recently announced plans to roll out contextual advertising to compete with the Google and Yahoo. Of course one of the big questions is whether Ask would have any innovations in the field or would it just be an Adsense copy cat?

While not earth shattering, it does appear Ask has managed to create something unique called Related Search Ads. Self Made Minds is the first webmaster I have seen report the new ad format. It’s similar to Google’s link unit with a few differences.

• There are a lot more links with the Ask ads compared to Google link units.
• The links open up in a new window and take users directly to an actual Ask.com search results page.
• Publishers are paid when surfers click on the ads in the search results.