BANGALORE, INDIA: Breaking the company's longstanding opposition to TV and brand advertising, search giant Google aired a Super Bowl commercial at Saints-Colts contest during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, the Mountain View, California on Sunday.

The ad, called 'Parisian Love', featured a Valentine's-worthy romance spelled out in Google search queries.

Buzz about Google's Super Bowl ad started spreading when CEO Eric Schmidt implied in a Twitter post that there would be one during the third quarter, urging his followers to “be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter”.

Those commercials, first aired on the YouTube video site, were developed by Google’s Japanese employees, according to a Bloomberg report. The Super Bowl commercial had a similar origin: It was part of a series of videos that ran on YouTube for more than three months, the report said.

Explaining the decision to air the ad, Eric Schmidt said in a blog post that Google didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search.

“If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience,” the blog post said.

So far Google was against such advertisements and in 2006, CEO Schmidt had even said that brand advertising is “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America”. So what made them embrace the ad world now? Any guess?