AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick

AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick management forced the engineering-focused AdWords management out. I don't know if you have any personal experience from that time period, but AdWords was magical for an online business in the mid-00s. You could get conversion rates orders of magnitude higher than display ads like DoubleClick. Whole businesses were built off of providing a solution to a problem that people were searching for. It was also a hell of a lot less intrusive than the banner ads that occupied the web in the late 1990s - AdWords was text only, and worked because you had a need, somebody had a solution, and Google matched them up. You didn't have to see all these products that you didn't need. We're unfortunately going back to the brand advertising days of a corporate monoculture, largely because Google Search (and the web in general) sucks now.