Mirago’s M3 ad server began life in 1997 as a development initiative within a company called Compsoft, who were specialists in high performance database engines. Engineers within the Mirago project took the core principles and technology found in the database world and applied them to the mass of unstructured data online.
The result of this was a robot that created an index of web searches in the UK, France, Germany and a number of other European countries. By 1998, Mirago had become the very first European search engine.
Through 1999 and 2000, Mirago developed its own ad platform to monetise the web indexes it had created. It then offered these indexes, along with the PPC advertisers it had accumulated, to third party search sites – the first two being Ask Jeeves and Infospace.
Mirago continued to develop and innovate its ad server further, earning itself an Honourable Mention at the 2004 SearchEngineWatch awards event in New York:
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Mirago has lead the industry on several fronts, and we’d like other paid listing providers to catch up!
In both 2005 and 2006 Mirago was named in the top 20 of The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100, which featured Britain’s fastest growing private technology companies. It was one of only three companies to appear in the top 20 for both those years.
In 2006, as companies like Google and Yahoo started to dominate the search industry, Mirago decided on a strategic shift. It began offering its ad serving technology on a white label basis to major publishers. Early adopters included Yell.com and Associated Newspapers.
In 2010 a new, more agile, cloud based platform was launched, which allowed Publishers and Media Networks to quickly and easily deploy their own platforms.
Today, the M3 platform hosts global media networks and continues to provide its partners with leading edge Ad Server technology.