TechPulse 360

During her keynote at the O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, Google’s search goddess Marissa Mayer revealed that a simple HTML tag helped Google generate over a billion dollars in advertising!

Mayer recalled the story when, in about 2000, Larry and Sergey came to her to help run ads on the right hand-side of Google’s search page without using a huge table, that would slow loading the entire page.

“If you look at all our competition, everyone is running a table through the whole page, does this terrible Flash-rendering at the end [which makes page loading slow],” said Mayer.

And sure enough, after looking through the HTML specifications, Mayer found the billion dollars HTML tag, which represents the amount that these ads on the right hand-side of the search page generate today.

For the more techie audience, Google used two HTML tables, one aligned right and one aligned left, instead of a single table with two columns, enabling Google to display the ads before the entire page finishes to load.

“It’s a tiny little thing in HTML. It’s not anything groundbreaking but it’s really amazing in terms of what opened up in terms of us being able to keep the page fast while opening up many more spots for advertisements and allowed more competition in our auction,” added Mayer.