Browsing around, I stumbled across Google’s 10th birthday (thanks to the Client Side and not my iGoogle, which made no mention of the milestone). Even on the ‘classic’ Google site, there wasn’t much fanfare, just a quick link to ‘come celebrate’ the occasion. Lots of YouTube integration and some geeky Google trivia lies on the other end of that link. But what caught my eye was the Google timeline–rich in hyperlinks and snippets of information.AdSense

Lots of good milestones in there–like the beta launch (kinda obvious), the April Fool’s debut of Gmail in 1994, Google Maps, along with the whole shabang of apps in its portfolio and other memorable moments of note. The tipping point, many will argue, was the advent of AdSense in March of 2003. The commoditization of search was inevitable, but with Google (and Applied Symantics) it was smart too. Not flashy or showy, not priced just for the big players. It was (is) targeted and reasonable and effective.

Without AdSense, I’m not sure Google would be the online behemoth it is today. It certainly wouldn’t be as rich.