However, eBay is keeping its ads off AdWords, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said. EBay Live begins Thursday in Boston.
The spat is yet another sign of what many consider a significant deterioration of relations between the two Internet giants in recent years, as Google has become a partial competitor to eBay.
Earlier Wednesday, Durzy said the decision to pull out the ads wasn't related to the party and characterized it as an ordinary experiment by eBay, similar to others the company constantly does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget.
But there is nothing ordinary about eBay and Google, and the pullout is likely to have significant repercussions for both companies while it lasts: EBay is the largest paid search advertiser in the U.S. and Google is the country's largest paid search ad network.
In March, eBay ranked first in the U.S. among paid search advertisers with 802 million sponsored link exposures, or 4.1 percent of the total, according to comScore Networks Inc. That doesn't even take into account eBay's comparison shopping engine, Shopping.com, which ranked third on that list with 357 million sponsored link exposures, or 1.8 percent of the total.
