Oingo

» see oingo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

AdSense was not a Google idea and did not arrive with a Google name. It was built in Santa Monica by a company called Oingo, launched in december 2000, and had been running under that name for two and a half years before Google bought the whole company on 23 april 2003 for a hundred and two million dollars and kept the product name it came with.

Oingo itself was a search engine, and that is the part nobody remembers. Gil Elbaz and Adam Weissman met at Caltech and started the company in 1998, six months before Google incorporated, on a bet that keyword matching was the wrong primitive. Their engine looked up meanings. If you searched for something, it tried to work out the concept behind the words and return documents about that concept, including documents that never used the words you typed.

The lexicon under it was WordNet, which a team at Princeton led by George Miller had spent fifteen years assembling: a map of English words joined to each other by what they mean rather than by how they are spelled. Oingo indexed the Open Directory Project on top of it and launched at Fall 1999 Internet World, where it won Best of Show. That was as good as it ever got as a consumer product.

This one is a long way from anything I did. In 1998 I was on a 33.6k line in Turkey, typing whatever came to mind into whatever box was in front of me, and the box in front of me had no opinion about meaning. Nobody at my end of the wire was choosing between search engines on epistemological grounds. You used what was fast and what came back with something.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a meaning engine was ~

The pitch sounds obvious now and was genuinely hard then. Words are ambiguous and searches are short, so a two-word query gives an engine almost nothing to work with. Oingo's answer was to resolve the query against an ontology first, ask the user which sense they meant when it could not tell, and then search the resolved concept. The company later called the underlying system CIRCA and described it as bringing semantic understanding to unstructured text, which is the sentence every company in this space has been writing ever since.

The problem was that PageRank had already answered the same question from the other end. Google did not try to understand what you meant. It worked out which pages other people had decided were worth linking to, which turns out to be an extremely good proxy for relevance and requires no lexicon at all. By the time Oingo had its meaning engine working, the market had a cheaper answer that was good enough, and search as a standalone business was closing.

~ the pivot nobody planned ~

So they sold the technology sideways. First to domain registrars, who paid to have Oingo suggest alternative names when the one a customer wanted was taken, which is a text-understanding problem wearing a very small hat. Then, in december 2000, to publishers: read a web page, work out what it is about, put a relevant advertisement on it. That was AdSense, and it was a footnote to the search product it came out of.

In may 2001 the company renamed itself Applied Semantics to reflect what it was now selling. The old site kept serving meaning-based search for another year or so out of habit, and the title on the homepage still said Oingo, Meaning Based Search as late as mid-2002. By early 2003 the address had been turned over to the parent brand entirely, which is the actual moment the search engine stopped existing, a few months before anybody paid for the remains.

Google announced the acquisition on 23 april 2003. A hundred and two million dollars in cash and pre-IPO stock, a little over forty staff who moved across and became Google's Santa Monica office, and a technology that within two years was carrying something like fifteen percent of the company's revenue. Elbaz ran engineering there until 2007 and took a Founders' Award in 2005. The search engine that started it all had been switched off for a year by then and never got a shutdown notice, because from the outside there was nothing left to shut down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »