can't serve text ads. You'd have to render the text as a bitmap image and we could serve that.'"
And there was another obstacle.
"They had nothing that allowed you to target to a search," Urs added, "and it was obvious that would be important. * So the question solved itself." Larry and Sergey took comfort from the fact that their old Stanford friends at the weather website Wunderground.com had written their own ad system and found it relatively easy to do.
"Here we were," Susan Wojcicki recalls, "maybe fifty to sixty people, and we were competing already with these huge companies that had much bigger market share in search than we did. And at the same time we were, 'Oh yes, of course, we should build our own advertising system, too.' We wanted to serve ads in every country and have the ads be targeted to every query. And we wanted it to be fast." The company's vision stretched beyond the feasible.
"This was around the time," Susan added, "that Larry decided we should also scan every book in the world." Stretched beyond the feasible by quite a bit.
Jeff Dean began working on systems for managing and serving ad campaigns. He was joined a week later by a recently hired engineer named Howard Gobioff—an iconoclastic thinker and rabid privacy advocate, Howard was a ponytailed, mullet-coiffed Carnegie Mellon PhD and weight-room habitué, equally comfortable sporting a tux, black motorcycle leathers, or a combination of the two. Within days, Jeff and Howard had a working prototype. Then they lent a hand to Marissa Mayer, who had been looking at ways to match ads to searches, and quickly knocked out an ad-targeting system.
To test their prototype, Jeff enrolled Google in Amazon's affiliate program. Every time someone clicked on one of our book ads and then bought that book on Amazon, Google would be paid a commission. Jeff dumped a hundred thousand titles into the new system, which began spewing ads across Google's results pages whenever someone searched for a novel or nonfiction work by name. Even though not every ad earned clicks, the system clearly worked. Suddenly Google was generating revenue, albeit modest revenue, from its ad system. No great huzzah went up. No champagne was uncorked. No expectations were raised. There was still work to be done.
There's Something We'd Like to Ad
The Amazon affiliate ads proved the program worked. Now we would try selling ads to companies that didn't have affiliate programs. The ads, appearing as text in boxes at the top of our results pages, would be sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis. In other words, advertisers would be charged every time Google displayed their ads (delivered impressions), whether anyone clicked on the ads or not, and the rate charged was based on a thousand showings of the ad. To make the program a real product, however, Google needed to be able to tell advertisers how much inventory was available for them to buy. For example, if an advertiser wanted to show an ad every time someone searched for "titanium golf clubs," we had to figure out how often "titanium golf clubs" showed up in our query stream.
Ed Karrels, who joined Google from SGI, built an inventory-estimation tool to harvest that data from our logs system so we could guarantee the number of ads we would show. Even more impressive to his fellow Googlers, Ed established a thirty-five-mile Friday morning round trip to the nearest Krispy Kreme, where he harvested four dozen donuts, loaded them into his silver Mercedes SLK 230, and drove them at dangerously high speeds back to the office. * Google now had fried dough Fridays and an actual advertising business.
In January 2000, the Google ad program slid into the open market without so much as a press release to announce it. Cindy thought we should make some waves, but she was overruled, perhaps because Larry and Sergey didn't want to alert the sharks circling startups like ours that fresh meat was swimming in their territorial waters.
And there was another obstacle.
"They had nothing that allowed you to target to a search," Urs added, "and it was obvious that would be important. * So the question solved itself." Larry and Sergey took comfort from the fact that their old Stanford friends at the weather website Wunderground.com had written their own ad system and found it relatively easy to do.
"Here we were," Susan Wojcicki recalls, "maybe fifty to sixty people, and we were competing already with these huge companies that had much bigger market share in search than we did. And at the same time we were, 'Oh yes, of course, we should build our own advertising system, too.' We wanted to serve ads in every country and have the ads be targeted to every query. And we wanted it to be fast." The company's vision stretched beyond the feasible.
"This was around the time," Susan added, "that Larry decided we should also scan every book in the world." Stretched beyond the feasible by quite a bit.
Jeff Dean began working on systems for managing and serving ad campaigns. He was joined a week later by a recently hired engineer named Howard Gobioff—an iconoclastic thinker and rabid privacy advocate, Howard was a ponytailed, mullet-coiffed Carnegie Mellon PhD and weight-room habitué, equally comfortable sporting a tux, black motorcycle leathers, or a combination of the two. Within days, Jeff and Howard had a working prototype. Then they lent a hand to Marissa Mayer, who had been looking at ways to match ads to searches, and quickly knocked out an ad-targeting system.
To test their prototype, Jeff enrolled Google in Amazon's affiliate program. Every time someone clicked on one of our book ads and then bought that book on Amazon, Google would be paid a commission. Jeff dumped a hundred thousand titles into the new system, which began spewing ads across Google's results pages whenever someone searched for a novel or nonfiction work by name. Even though not every ad earned clicks, the system clearly worked. Suddenly Google was generating revenue, albeit modest revenue, from its ad system. No great huzzah went up. No champagne was uncorked. No expectations were raised. There was still work to be done.
There's Something We'd Like to Ad
The Amazon affiliate ads proved the program worked. Now we would try selling ads to companies that didn't have affiliate programs. The ads, appearing as text in boxes at the top of our results pages, would be sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis. In other words, advertisers would be charged every time Google displayed their ads (delivered impressions), whether anyone clicked on the ads or not, and the rate charged was based on a thousand showings of the ad. To make the program a real product, however, Google needed to be able to tell advertisers how much inventory was available for them to buy. For example, if an advertiser wanted to show an ad every time someone searched for "titanium golf clubs," we had to figure out how often "titanium golf clubs" showed up in our query stream.
Ed Karrels, who joined Google from SGI, built an inventory-estimation tool to harvest that data from our logs system so we could guarantee the number of ads we would show. Even more impressive to his fellow Googlers, Ed established a thirty-five-mile Friday morning round trip to the nearest Krispy Kreme, where he harvested four dozen donuts, loaded them into his silver Mercedes SLK 230, and drove them at dangerously high speeds back to the office. * Google now had fried dough Fridays and an actual advertising business.
In January 2000, the Google ad program slid into the open market without so much as a press release to announce it. Cindy thought we should make some waves, but she was overruled, perhaps because Larry and Sergey didn't want to alert the sharks circling startups like ours that fresh meat was swimming in their territorial waters.
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