The fact they hired an ad engineer doesn't equal adwords. What she's saying is actually common sense: other search engines had ads at the time, and targetted t

The fact they hired an ad engineer doesn't equal adwords. What she's saying is actually common sense: other search engines had ads at the time, and targetted to the appropriate search queries and results. Google had lower burn because all they had was a search engine, while othrs had massive portals. Google's search technology was done in house, while others licensed Akamai. (Yahoo had manual editors at the time, too.). This also meant the portals had nearly the same results and Google was where you could get an alternate opinion. Google kept their ads separate from search results, which was lauded by Slashdot users and Google picked up lots of word of mouth about that. After that, Google came up with the do no evil motto as an official stance. (Only as Google grew bigger did this motto get associated with Microsoft comparisons by the zealous Linux userbase of Slashdot.) When Google came out with AdWords, it was basically a clone of Overture; it was AdSense that was an actual innovation. This is from my memory of the events, not press releases, biographies, or books, so it's probably more correct :)