Google has unveiled a new ad serving platform for internet publishers, merging the platform it acquired from DoubleClick in 2008 with its native Google Ad Manager.

Mountain View will now offer a single ad serving platform known as DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP. "We see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google's technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick's display advertising and ad serving experience," the company said Monday morning in a blog post.

The new platform comes in two flavors: DoubleClick for Publishers proper, for large online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a free version for the little guy. Those using the existing DoubleClick ad serving platform - DART for Publishers - will be upgraded to the full DFP "over the next year we continue to add features and modules," while current Google Ad Manager users will be upgraded to DFP Small Business "in the coming weeks."

Google announced its DoubleClick acquisition in April 2007, and the $3.1bn deal closed in March 2008, after finally receiving approval from the EU.

A year later, Google announced that it had introduced behavioral ad targeting on YouTube and its AdSense partner sites - though it preferred to call this "interest-based advertising". The company later told The Reg that this involved using the existing DoubleClick cookie across third-party AdSense publishers.

This allows Google to track your surfing habits as you move from partner AdSense sites to sites using DoubleClick's ad management platform, although the company indicates that - at least in some cases - the data is not combined.

Then, in September of last year, Google introduced the DoubleClick Ad Exchange - a marketplace where ad buyers can bid on excess inventory offered up by publishers - and this was integrated with Google's existing AdWords and AdSense programs. AdWords is where advertisers serve up their own ads onto third-party AdSense sites and the Google search engine. ®