ReadWriteWeb

Google just announced that it has acquired Teracent, a display ad company that specializes in creating customized display ads in real-time based on machine-learning algorithms. While regular display ads always look the same for every user, Teracent's ads are automatically created from multiple creative elements and can change according to factors like geographic location and language, as well as the content of the website, time of day, and the past performance of different ads. As Andy Beal describes it, this is basically "multi-variate testing for your banner ads."