After having made an indelible mark in the web search advertising arena, the Internet search biggie Google will today launch its new DoubleClick advertising exchange -- an auction system wherein advertisers and publishers buy and sell space for 'display' advertisements, comprising pictorial banners and banners, across the countless sites.

In an announcement on its blog, Google specified that its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be a kind of stock exchange featuring online display ads; and the advertising mechanism will be quite similar to the AdWords system for text advertising.

Elaborating about the Ad Exchange, Google said that the new system will provide advertisers with a much wider choice of ad space, along with enabling them to target ads more specifically to the most prospective customers. The exchange would allow Web sites to offer space that agencies and online brokers can bid for, in a fully automated auction system.

Google's main objective behind the new endeavor is to make the deployment of display advertising completely trouble-free, so that increased number of advertisers and publishers can run their ads; thereby saving time as well as effort required for creating and distributing ads on thousands of sites.

Noting that display advertising is presently "not living up to its full potential," Neal Mohan, Google's VP for product management, said that the idea behind DoubleClick Ad Exchange is "to grow the overall display-advertising pie."