The world's largest online auction house, eBay, has said it will resume buying advertising through Google, ending one of the most public tiffs in the internet space in recent times.

The auction site pulled its ads from Google nearly two weeks ago as part of a protest against the search company's attempt to woo eBay customers to a rival payment service.

But the site — one of the largest users of Google's pay-per-click advertising system, AdWords — said that it would buy fewer ads than previously, relying more heavily on competing services, such as Yahoo!'s, and Microsoft's MSN.

"What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought," Hani Durvy, a spokesman for eBay, said. Mr Durvy declined to reveal figures, but said that the company's withdrawal from AdWords would be "significant".

Tension had been simmering between the companies since the launch by Google of Checkout, an online payment service designed to compete with PayPal, which is owned by eBay.

At a recent conference for eBay merchants held in Boston, Google organised a rival party as part of a campaign to lure eBay users to its Checkout service, launched last year, which is attempting to topple PayPal's monopoly on online payment.

EBay responded by pulling the entirety of its advertising on Google-affiliated sites in the US, prompting Google to cancel its party.

The incident highlighted the delicate relationship between the companies, which compete but also rely on one another for traffic and revenue.

As many as 188 million ads for eBay appeared on Google in March — more than double the number for the search engine's next biggest advertiser, the department store Target, and analysts estimate that the site generates $100 million a year in revenue for Google.

EBay is concerned, however, that Google's Checkout service may erode the business from PayPal, which was responsible for $1.4 billion in revenues — about a quarter of the company's total — last year.

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