Eytan Elbaz who was part of the ownership group that sold Applied Semantics (formerly Oingo) to Google gave an interview to AllthingsD.com yesterday on the 10th anniversary of the deal that really gave Google what they needed to put together its Adwords product.

Here is an except of the interview which you can read here.

“”Ten years ago today, my business partners and I sold Applied Semantics to Google. At the time, it was Google’s largest acquisition to date. In the following years we worked together with our new family at Google to grow AdSense into a multibillion-dollar business.””

 

“”The original idea of Oingo was to build a Yahoo-like directory of websites which would be run by a network of freelancers competing for the right to build portions of the directory. During the spring of 1999 we worked hard to build a prototype, but soon found a competing product called DMOZ, which was later acquired by Netscape. We tried another three ideas: Oingo Free Search, DomainSense and DomainAppraise, before we finally got to building and releasing AdSense in December 2000.”

“Several large portals beta tested the product, though none of them were willing to license it. ”

“AdSense sat on a shelf for two full years as we launched another two products, DomainPark and Error Page Assistant.

In late 2002, we successfully relaunched AdSense — our eighth product launch.”