Search Advertising
Google's AdWords, launched on 23 October 2000, had around three hundred and fifty advertisers, and charged by impression: fifteen dollars per thousand for the top slot. Nothing like the thing we know. Serving against the searched words and charging only on a click came two years later, in 2002. And the design where the highest bidder does not automatically sit at the top — placement decided by bid multiplied by a quality score — settled three or four years after that. Today's shape came through four stages. A hundred and sixty-seven years after the penny press, the river of «the advertiser pays» reaches its greatest volume here: roughly three-quarters of Alphabet's revenue is still advertising. As for the lawsuit, it was settled in shares. Yahoo, which had bought Overture, received 2.7 million Class A shares — around 230 million dollars at the offering price. Ten days before the great occasion, a debt to the inventor was quietly paid.
The myth, corrected
The pay-per-click auction was Google's invention
It was Bill Gross's. His GoTo.com launched in June 1998 a search engine where bidding decided a keyword's placement and charging happened only on a click — before Google was founded, and four years before AdWords moved to pay-per-click. In 2002, GoTo.com, by then renamed Overture, sued Google over the patent. It was settled on 9 August 2004 — ten days before Google's stock market debut.