Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), Google Inc (GOOG): The Strange Coincidence That Built Wintel

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Making sense of online advertising

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) publicly launched AdSense, its targeted site-advertising platform, on June 18, 2003. The program, which had been in trial mode for several months, was Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s first real effort to broaden the reach of its monetization strategies beyond the ads that show up when someone uses the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) search engine. AdSense would operate without searches, instead indexing the copy on websites and using it to serve customized ad results.

The technology had been largely developed by a company called Applied Semantics, which Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) had purchased two months earlier to bolster its contextual-advertising capabilities. The potential for this new advertising technology was immediately apparent: By becoming a self-service advertiser of choice for the entire Internet, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) could generate revenue whether or not people happened to be using its search engine at any given moment. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s control over so much of the Internet’s advertising infrastructure has not been without controversy, but this expansion has been greatly beneficial for the company, which now generates roughly a quarter of its advertising revenue from placement on independent websites.

The article The Strange Coincidence That Built Wintel originally appeared on Fool.com is written by Alex Planes.

Fool contributor Alex Planes owns shares of Intel. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter @TMFBiggles for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends FedEx, Google, and Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of Google, Intel, International Business Machines, and Microsoft.

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