With the ad piece in place to complement search, google.com began to innovate in earnest. Some moves were obvious, such as Google publishing and acquiring digital assets that would deliver more ad-driven revenue as traffic grew and more ad space as content increased. These included YouTube (acquired 2006), Google Maps (2005), Blogger (2003), and Google Finance (2006).

However, Google also created a number of sites and web apps that weren’t initially built to be monetized through ads. Google Books falls into this latter category as it is a repository of books online with ads playing a very small role. Similarly, ads are hard to find on Google News, a real-time collection of current content from thousands of news sources. Gmail (2004) started out ad-free and cost-free, but newer iterations give the user the choice between free with ads or paid without ads. The first versions of all these sites were far from perfection. Google put up the beta versions and then allowed users to find and prioritize the improvements to be included in the next version.