BusinessWire: META Group Predicts Commercial Search Market to Reach $5 Billion Over Next Two Years

The META Group, an IT research firm, says that "commercial search" revenues will exceed $5 billion eventually. But in announcing the finding, the firm seems to confuse the terms search revenue and contextual advertising, as though they were synonymous. Their finding that the market will grow to $5 billion per year would be intelligible were they to consistently confuse the two different types of search-related advertising, but they seem to alternate between munging them together and considering them separate beasts. Well, it wouldn't be an IT research report if it didn't try to coin a new phrase. Maybe we're just the victims of linguistic evolution.