The players

62 companies and organisations in the search arbitrage chain, what each one does in plain English, and where it sits in the chain.

Applied Semantics

Start-up bought by Google in April 2003 whose technology and AdSense name became Google's contextual ad business.

The company behind Ask.com, for years a large search-to-search arbitrage operator, closed by IAC on 1 May 2026.

Israeli toolbar maker that earned search-ad money by changing users' default search; merged into Perion in 2014.

Barry Diller's holding company, owner of Ask.com until it closed its search business in 2026; now trades as PPLI.

Dot-com era metasearch company (Dogpile, WebCrawler) whose search business System1 bought for $45 million in 2016.

Early web directory and pay-per-click network that lost most of its revenue overnight when Microsoft left in 2003.

Seattle firm that bet on type-in domain traffic in 2004, sold the names to GoDaddy in 2015, now does call analytics.

The company that invented pay-per-click search ads and the syndicated search feed; bought by Yahoo in 2003.