justageek - 12:27 pm on Jan 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

This can and has been worked out and has been running from other folks for a while now.

There are two ways that I know of that it is done today and it is quite easy. The first way is to hyperlink certain keywords within an html e-newsletter and when a user clicks on it a new window opens with relevant search results. The second is to insert an image tag into the newsletter where an image version of an ad block is inserted in real time when the user opens the newsletter and takes the user directly to the advertiser.

Both options are automatic and only requires the sender to send the email to an email address. A program on the receiving end parses through the newsletter to determine what it is about and then decides what keywords to highlight or what image tag to insert. The e-newsletter is sent back to the sender to deliver through their normal means.

The whole process takes only a few minutes to do depending on internet traffic.

The manual way to do it is to allow the e-newsletter owner to insert the call to the ad image themselves if privacy issues are a concern.

I kinda knew Google was going to do this but if I told you how this post would self destruct ;-)

JAG