Not content to be just a giant online e-commerce website, Amazon is trying to get its hands in every other industry. Earlier this year, the company launched its first smartphone, the Amazon Fire Phone, into the public marketplace. Now, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is developing a targeted advertising system that would go up against Google’s industry-ruling AdWords.

Countless companies around the world use Google AdWords to get word out about their business. The system uses targeted, keyword-based ads and then positions them as sponsored results on Google searches (the pages that show up along the lefthand side of the page). AdWords also places relevant ads on many other websites.

Amazon’s own advertising platform, which is currently being referred to as “Amazon Sponsored Links” (expect a snappier name for when the platform officially opens for business), would compete directly with Google’s AdWords in selling bulk ads to businesses and then placing them around the internet. And while Amazon might not have the advantage of owning the biggest search engine in the history of the web, it does have another ace up its sleeve: customer information.

Indeed, Amazon has so many customers – and so much information about those customers, thanks to shopping histories – that the company would automatically be a valuable partner for most advertisers to have. If nothing else, businesses would be interested in getting sponsored ads about their products and services on the sidebars of Amazon.com searches.

Of course, Amazon would need to do some thinking about how to distribute ads throughout other parts of the web, and it would certainly take time before Amazon Sponsored Links could take on Google AdWords at its own game. However, with Amazon’s level of resources – not to mention the company’s current expansion avenues, like smartphones and local services – there’s little doubt that the e-commerce titan could make it happen.