When she's not boring shareholders silly, Yahoo president Sue Decker has been trying to beguile advertisers to buy a new form of online advertising: "nonguaranteed" ads. Her campaign started in earnest at an Internet Advertising Bureau conference in February; it continued in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Strip aside the technical mumbo-jumbo, and you learn this: "Guaranteed" ads run at specified times, on specified websites. "Nonguaranteed" ads run wherever, whenever, at Yahoo's discretion.

Decker is hoping, in other words, that advertisers will simply hand Yahoo their online-advertising budgets and trust it to place ads. Google already does this with its auction-sold search ads — and advertisers are furious about how their ads get placed willy-nilly by the hubristic search engine's secret algorithms. Here's how to use the word in cocktail-party chatter: "Yahoo's advertising strategy is nonguaranteed to succeed." (Photo by John Battelle)