Applied Semantics
Start-up bought by Google in April 2003 whose technology and AdSense name became Google's contextual ad business.
Santa Monica, California, USA · google.com/adsense
What Applied Semantics does
Applied Semantics was a Californian company, earlier called Oingo, that built software to work out what a piece of text is about. It sold a product named AdSense that matched ads to the meaning of a web page, and it was active in showing ads on unused domain names.
Google bought it in April 2003, a few weeks after launching its own content-targeting programme, and adopted the AdSense name. The domain-ads side grew into AdSense for Domains, the product that paid the parking industry for two decades until Google removed parked domains from its network in February 2026.
How it makes money
Before the acquisition, licence and advertising revenue from its contextual-matching products.
Products
- AdSense (original)
- Domain-name ad matching