Last week, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) pulled out its AdWords from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). A week later, it's still not clear who was hit harder by the move, Google or eBay. Now it's time to try and examine the impact of this move on both companies. It is difficult to come up with exact, accurate data as, of course, both companies keep such metrics to themselves. I'll at least try to put the little we know/estimate in context.

First Google. It has been suggested that eBay is the single largest buyer of AdWords. What does it mean? According to some analysts, eBay spends $25 million a quarter on advertising on Google. It may not sound much when compared to Google's overall revenue ($3.7 billion in latest quarter), but it does hurt, and also sets a dangerous precedent for other advertisers.

Now eBay, which is a little more tricky:

ChannelAdvisor is an online retailing facilitator, meaning that it fills in the gaps and provides powerful tools that lighten the burden for sellers of larger inventories to place and manage their items for sale. ChannelAdvisor has just bolstered its total received in venture capital to $60 million. CEO Scot Wingo indicates that the intent of this increase in venture capital is to underwrite continued growth. Wingo states that, "Our revenues are growing more than 65% year-over-year so our valuation has reflected that." You may read his insightful commentary regarding the course of retail internet merchandising in this excellent interview on Business 2.0 Beta.

So what has this got to do with eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY)? Quite a lot actually, and the connections are something less than subtle. eBay is a major stakeholder in ChannelAdvisor. You could safely say that the two entities are closely aligned. What poses an odd scenario to me is, wouldn't it appear to the casual observer that eBay is therefore underwriting the success of their closest competitor, especially in light of the fact that ChannelAdvisor is ratcheting the performance of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) above that of rival eBay? I don't get it. Do you?

What occurs to me is that eBay has a vision for itself that it's just not telling us about yet. Does it see itself basing future operations on a different retailing tier than Amazon? Does it plan to make an overture for Amazon at some point down the road? Or does it see itself and Amazon as co-existing within the retail realm with the expectation that there is enough revenue to go around? The fact of the matter is that this is a very strange internet love triangle, and one that could play out in several different ways. I'm open for theories on what this is, why it is, and where it will go. Please share your opinions, won't you?