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8/31/02 China blocks access to Google results again

9/11/02 Content-targeting project starts

9/22/02 Google news launches

10/1/02 Expansion to Saladoplex

11/20/02 Project Ocean launches (digitizing offline content)

12/12/02 Froogle launches

12/13/02 Yahoo buys Inktomi

1/6/03 Milan office opens

2/14/03 Google acquires Blogger.com

2/25/03 Overture buys FAST

3/12/03 Microsoft calls Google "pathetic"

4/11/03 1,000 Googlers

4/24/03 Google acquires Applied Semantics (content-targeting firm)

6/6/03 Yahoo to spend $10 million on branding campaign

6/17/03 Google stock splits

6/18/03 AdSense launches (self-service content-targeted ads)

9/25/03 Leak of financial data

12/3/03 All logs data available in Sawmill system

1/16/04 Yahoo drops Google

1/22/04 orkut launches

1/28/04 Leaks to the New York Times

4/1/04 Gmail launches

4/29/04 S-1 filed, "quiet period" begins

7/8/04 Financial planning fairs for Googlers

8/9/04 Yahoo/Overture settles patent lawsuit with Google

8/10/04 Playboy interview with founders published; one-week IPO delay

8/19/04 IPO

10/21/04 Earnings call

2/1/05 Earnings call

2/3/05 Microsoft announces $200 million ad campaign for search

3/4/05 My last day at Google

Glossary

This book is written in English but contains some phrases in

Geekspeak. Here's what they mean.

AdSense: Google CPC ads that appeared on other websites next to content other than search results and were content targeted.

AdWords: The second Google advertising program, after Google Original Ads. AdWords gave advertisers the ability to create and manage their own CPM ad campaigns using an online tool and a credit card. The ads contained only text, no images, and would automatically appear next to Google.com search results when a user searched for the keyword(s) targeted by the advertiser.

AdWords Select: The successor to AdWords. The system that introduced auction-based CPC pricing for Google ads.

Affiliate program: A program by which one website pays other websites to send it traffic. The sites sending the traffic are called "affiliates." For example, Amazon pays a commission to affiliates that promote specific books it offers for sale. The affiliate gets paid only if one of its users clicks on a specially encoded link pointing to Amazon, and then actually purchases the book there. Google's program paid affiliates if their users conducted searches using special Google search boxes that could be added to almost any website.

Algorithm: A set of instructions (such as a computer program) for solving a specific problem, like finding a particular bit of information in a database. Also, a stiff, rocking motion modeled by a former vice-president.

Canonical: When engineers don't want to say "the preferred" or "the usual" way of doing something, they talk about the canonical example, which is pretty much the same thing but conveys a more exalted sense of correctness to the practice in question. The canonical way to avoid spending an hour in traffic is to go to work at noon.

Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of people seeing an ad who actually click on it. A high CTR means an ad is effective at driving traffic to the advertiser's website. Anything better than 1 or 2 percent is considered high for most types of ads, but CTRs improve the more targeted an ad is to the interests of the person viewing it.

Content targeting: The placement of ads relevant to the text of the page on which they appear. This requires analyzing the page's content and then matching ads from a database that are likely to appeal to someone reading that content. For example, a news story about vacationing in Florida might include ads about theme parks there, airlines, and hotels.

CPC: "Cost per click"—a method of paying for online advertising in which the advertiser pays only when a user actually clicks on the ad and is transferred to the advertiser's website. This is a form of "pay-for-performance" advertising.

CPM: "Cost per thousand impressions"-a method of paying for online advertising in which advertisers