What's AdScape doing now? Good question. It's somewhere in Google's advertising empire, just presumably in a quiet corner. One day, though, the big G's targeted advertising may pop up in a game near you.

• dMarc Broadcasting: Even further down on the list of not-quite-so-successful ad attempts is dMarc Broadcasting, in January of 2006. The company was meant to help Google , and it did -- for a short while.

Earlier this year, , effectively sending dMarc to the gDump and Google ads off of America's airwaves.

• Applied Semantics: Ah, the one that started it all. Google in 2003, marking the beginning of the AdSense program and Google's status as a serious advertising player. You know all those little text ads that pop up on Google searches and on countless other Web sites? You can thank Applied Semantics for getting that ball rolling and providing the foundation for the various Google ads we see today.

Google Acquisitions: The Next Steps