An ascending auction is strategically equivalent to a 'Vickery' 2nd price auction and logistically simpler, since it only requires one round of bidding.
An ascending price auction is strategically different from a second price auction when the bidders each have a noisy estimate of some underlying true value. With a second price auction, the only information you can incorporate into your bid is your own signal. With an ascending price auction, you can look at the prices at which the other bidders drop out (except the second highest bidder) and incorporate that information into the price at which you're willing to drop out. This also means that an ascending price auction raises more revenue than a second price auction, by the linkage principle.
Evidence by “That left Baidu, Google, and Microsoft. As the bids continued to climb, first to $15 million and then to $20 million, Microsoft dropped out too, but then returned. “.
Microsoft could not have “returned” in a Vickrey auction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
This ignores phycological factors, and some minor quirks relating to minimum bid increases.