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AdWords launched quietly in a beta test version late on September 27, 2000. Two hours later, Lively Lobsters in Kingston, Rhode Island, signed on as the first customer (keyword: lobster) with an eighty-three-dollar ad buy. Ryan Bartholomew, Lively Lobster's owner, ad manager, and sole employee, quickly figured out that AdWords would be an easy way to make money from other sites' affiliate programs. He placed AdWords ads for books on Amazon.com, as Jeff Dean had done with his first Google ad system, and earned a commission that more than covered his costs. He found adult-site affiliate programs to be especially lucrative. According to Bartholomew, he grew his affiliate optimization empire to a sixteen-person business that placed more than twelve million dollars in ads on Google over the next decade.

Lobsters and porn. From its very first customer, AdWords proved its versatility and potential as a moneymaking tool. Twenty other customers signed on in the next two days, and with them came new issues we hadn't considered. Someone wanted to use "Google" as a keyword trigger to display an ad. Was that okay? Jane Manning, the project manager, decided it set a bad precedent, and we disallowed it. Should we treat ads targeting the trademarks of other companies the same way? An engineer suggested we forbid any trademark targeting, but how, then, I wondered, would you handle words like "staples," which is both a company name and a generic term? Larry and Sergey decided not to restrict others' trademarks, but the issue would eventually go to the courts, who at the time of this writing have sided with Google. That was part of the excitement of working for a company unrestrained by precedent. We improvised as we went along and watched as the rest of the world caught up.

AdWords formally launched on October 23, 2000, and accelerated past the outer moons of Jupiter on its way to some distant galaxy made entirely of money. No PR crisis ensued. If inappropriate ads did run, no one noticed because they were merely wet spots within an ocean of searches. Still, we instituted a limit to ensure ads were reviewed before we delivered too many impressions, and we hired a temp to check each new ad by hand.

Would Google never tire of succeeding with big ideas that I found patently ludicrous? It was starting to make me feel like a crotchety geezer yelling at kids to get off his lawn.

Laughing at Our Mistakes

I had christened AdWords with my own name. Next I worked on giving it my own voice. Emboldened by the feedback on MentalPlex and my growing confidence as Google's word guy, I started gently introducing bits of humor where they weren't specifically called for.

"Okay, we've got a problem here," I wrote for an error message. "Not only did something not work right with our software, it went so spectacularly wrong that our automatic report generator can't begin to describe it for our engineering group. You can help." I went on to suggest that users email us details including their horoscope signs.

"Sorry, something didn't work correctly," another message read. "If we knew exactly what the problem was, we would tell you instead of giving you this useless error message. Actually, if we knew, we would most likely have fixed it already. Rest assured. A report will soon be in the hands or our engineering team detailing the bad thing that happened here."

When the AdWords team not only raised no objections but thanked me profusely, I rejoiced. I no longer worked at a company where everyone wanted a cut at neutering my language. My colleagues didn't know "professional" marketers would assume user ignorance, target the lowest common denominator, and eschew polysyllabic words. I wasn't about to tell them. Besides, they were focused on the code swimming across their screens. Words not preceded by a command prompt were insignificant.

I began writing copy for the site as if the person reading it were a friend. I added Simpsons references to our FAQs, made puns in our newsletter, and, after engineer Amit Patel confessed a love of prosimians and