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Orthogonal: Engineers often talk about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like "eleven-sided." It doesn't. It's some kind of technical way to say "unrelated." I still don't really get it. But that didn't stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers: "Oh, yeah, that press release is totally orthogonal to the ads we're running on Yahoo."

Overture: The name assumed by the advertising network GoTo in October 2001.

PageRank: An algorithm used for analyzing the relative importance of pages on the web. Written by, and named for, Google's co-founder Larry Page. PageRank's breakthrough approach was to look at the sites linking to a particular page to determine how many other websites deemed that page authoritative or important.

Pay for inclusion: Some search engines accept payment from website owners to guarantee that their sites will be included in search results. These search engines don't necessarily guarantee the site prominent placement. Web-crawling software can take weeks or months to find new sites; pay for inclusion gives those sites a way to accelerate the process.

Pay for performance (PFP): A method of paying for online advertising in which the advertiser pays only when users actually perform an agreed-upon action, such as clicking on the ad or registering for an account on the advertiser's website.

Pay for placement: The practice of some search engines to accept payment from website owners to give their sites more prominence within search results, as opposed to in a separate, clearly marked advertising area.

Query: The words a user types into a search box, or a single search. See Keyword.

Server: A computer that has been configured to hold large amounts of information and provide it to other computers quickly across a network.

So ... : This all-purpose word is not a word at all. It's the sound of an engineer clearing his or her throat before beginning to speak. The first week I worked at Google, it seemed as if some linguistic virus had infected all the technical staff. Every sentence in every conversation began this way. So ..., eventually, I got used to it.

Software: The part of a computer you can't touch: the programming and applications that instruct it what to do. All the bits and bytes that are stored in a computer's memory.

Spam: As a noun, "spam" is any unrequested and unwanted electronic material sent by one person to another, whether it's junk email sent to thousands of people simultaneously or a chain letter sent by your very close friend who swears something bad will happen if you don't forward it to ten others. As a verb, "to spam" means to send spam and can also mean to try to obtain an advantage, such as a higher ranking in search results, through deceptive practices, including hidden text on pages or unnecessary repetition of certain words.

Spider: Web-crawling software that gathers data from websites that are the basis for an index. See Crawler.

Targeting: Matching an ad to a trigger that causes it to be displayed. The trigger may be a keyword a user enters for a search, or the content of a web page determined to be relevant to the subject of the ad. The better the targeting, the more relevant the ad is to the keyword or content that triggers it, and the more likely the user is to click on it.

TGIF: Short for "Thank God it's Friday," and the name of a weekly meeting where Googlers are updated on the week's events, usually while munching on chicken wings and drinking beer.

Trivial: As defined by Google engineer Georges Harik: "I say that a task is, 'trivial' if I think it is possible. It's, 'easy' if I can't see a way to do it but I'm certain it can be done. It's, 'hard' if several people have declared it impossible but I disagree with them. It's, 'impossible' if I am too tired to do it."

URL: Short for "uniform resource locator." A URL is the address of a particular page on the web. Many URLs begin with "http://www." and end