History

Oingo, Inc., a privately held company located in Los Angeles, was started in 1998 by Gilad Elbaz and Adam Weissman. Oingo developed a proprietary search algorithm that was based on word meanings and built upon an underlying lexicon called WordNet, which was developed over the previous 15 years by researchers at Princeton University, led by George Miller. Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics in 2001, which was later acquired by Google in April 2003. In 2009, Google AdSense announced that it would now be offering new features, including the ability to "enable multiple networks to display ads". In February 2010, Google AdSense started using search history in contextual matching to offer more relevant ads.