Applied launched as a search engine called Oingo in the late 1990s but changed its name and refocused on its core linguistic analysis software in May 2001. The company’s Santa Monica office will become Mountain View-based Google’s latest development lab.
The company’s main asset is an ontology of English words and their synonyms. Applied says this can be used to derive meaning from words and phrases. It is used, for example, in the domain name business to offer customers alternative, synonymous names when their first choice is taken.
But Google wants the technology for its search and advertising programs, Google said, particularly its content-targeted advertising offering which was launched at the beginning of March. Applied’s AdSense product extracts concepts from pages and uses that data to target advertising, the company said.
Google offers a paid-performance search engine service to portals that carry its own or rival web search engines, but it also recently started offering a separate service that places text link ads on non-search web pages based on the content of that page. A number of Knight Ridder media properties are early adopters.
Source: Computerwire
