After their bust up over a spolier party earlier this month, eBay and Google are back in bed together, albeit with less cash changing hands.

eBay got huffy when the search strumpet, which is going after PayPal's online payments dominance with its cheaper Checkout system, tried to pimp itself at a party on the fringes of a partner event in Boston. eBay summarily withdrew its advertising, which had made it Google's best punter.

In a rare public defeat, Google flinched, and canned the party.

eBay's spinners have sold the line that the blockade was a planned "experiment" to see what effect Google ads have on the global jumble market. After ten days, the text ads came back on Friday, though eBay couldn't resist another shot at its rival/partner. Spokesman Hani Durzy told AP: "Overall the takeaway for us was that we weren't as dependent on AdWords as some out there thought."

During the Google freeze, Durzy said the slack was ably taken up by Yahoo!, AOL and MSN, who "really stepped up". He said eBay would permanently clip its AdWords spend by a "significant" sum.®

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