• JackLSauce@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Google Ads was born out of a need to monetize search traffic. In the late 1990s, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were struggling to find a way to make money from their search engine. They came up with the idea of selling advertising space on their search engine results pages, and Google Ads was born.

    Initially, the idea was met with skepticism. Many advertisers were hesitant to spend money on online advertising, and Google was still a relatively unknown company. However, Page and Brin persisted, and in October 2000, they launched Google AdWords.

    Honestly didn’t know they waited 4 years before monetizing anything

    Edit: for those who’d like this source but Wikipedia says similar and, of course, if anybody finds a counterfactual I’d be interested: https://www.webmonster.com/the-evolution-of-google-ads-past-present-and-future/

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      I was there, I remember. When they announced the sponsored links in search results a lot of people were concerned. Google had only just started becoming the search engine of choice, with better results than we’d ever seen from engines like Yahoo! Alta Vista, Lycos, etc. Everyone was afraid the paid links would ruin the results and block out the actually useful information. For a long time that didn’t happen, but in the past few years the search results have gotten noticeably worse.

      • remotelove@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, not only is the first page and a half ads, its promptly followed by another page of AI bullshit. Maybe you get some search results after that.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      If I recall correctly, they had free servers and hard drives from their university. I don’t know if the university knew just how much of their resources Larry and Sergey were going to use when they agreed to let them use it.