If the internet has proven anything, it's that you don't have to be big to beat the best. That may very well be the mantra of Proximic, a 14-man German startup that is looking to take down Google's AdSense.

While others focus on beating Google at search, Proximic hopes to beat AdSense by syndicating product listings as contextual ads. Proximic recently signed syndication deals with eBay's Shopping.com and Yahoo's shopping network.

The technology used by Proximic will allow web publishers to place an ad widget on their site that indexes the page and serves contextually relevant ads. By combining inventory from eBay, Yahoo and other sources, Proximic estimates it will have a total of about 50 million ads. 

But inventory may not be Proximic's greatest strength. According to Thomas Nitsche, the company's CTO, Proximic uses proximity analysis to determine relevance.

"We look at patterns of letters," Nitsche told TechCrunch. "We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page."

Translation: Proximic won't be using semantic or keyword methods to place ads. So far, eBay and Yahoo, which previously hadn't syndicated their ads elsewhere, are betting that Proximic may have found a strong alternative to AdSense.