In the most intensely fought battle of Google and Microsoft it seems that advertisers are ending up with most benefits. Both companies have dedicated a research lab which comes up with interesting tools. These tools are fun to play with and some of them are very helpful for marketing research.

Google has it’s own research lab which they call it as Google Labs. They have classified tools into two parts. On left hand side they have listed tools that have not been graduated and on right hand side they have declared some tools as “Graduates of Labs”. The selection of the word “Graduate” is very interesting and shows the penchant of the Google founders to University campus environment. My personal favourite tool is Google Trends . Enter any keyword and it comes up with a graph and statistics of keyword in terms of cities, regions and languages.

Microsoft calls it’s resarch lab as Microsoft adCenter Labs. There are 4 groups divided into Paid Search, Intelligence, Contextual Advertising and Emerging Media. Here my personal favourite is keyword trends. Both Google Trends and Keyword trends present with you some useful data. In fact Microsoft has even integrated the keyword trends with their Microsoft adCenter account.

Comparing both tools apples by apples, I found that Microsoft Keyword Trends is more better. Not only they present you with keyword trend data but also with more useful age and gender data. These can be used to an advantage while targetting marketing segments in paid campaigns.

With whatever tools both companies are developing, the advertisers are only going to benefit. Such positive competition is always encouraging to see and in coming months we should expect more and more tools coming from both companies.