May 24, 2004
Search Engine Schtuff
Let's get started on some of these search engine marketing posts. First a (very) brief history of Search.
In the stoneage (mid-1990's) there were a whole slew of search engines. Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc, etc. None of them were all that good since Search was in its infancy. Heck, the world wide web itself was still a baby!
They all did okay sorting things out, but you have to remember that back then there were merely a million or so documents on the web. Nothing like today when the various search engines tout that they have 5 or 6 Billion pages indexed, and freely admit that they're indexing less than 1/10th of the pages available.
Then along came the little engine that could, better known as Google.
Sergey and Larry came up with a new method of determining which pages should be listed before other pages. At the time their new method, or algorithm, was pretty revolutionary.
Google's ability to return relevant results to searchers, and the sheer size of their database of sites when compared to the other search engines gave them a very definite advantage over everybody else. By the late 90's Google absolutely dominiated the search market.
In addition to the searchers who used Google.com, anyone searching on Yahoo.com, AOL.com and several smaller search properties all saw Google results. For all intents and purposes search became a one-horse town, with Google directly controlling approximately 3/4's of the market.
That brings us up to the end of 2003 for the most part. I've left out a lot of niggling details over the years, but that'll bring you up to speed.
Next time... We look at the *Massive* changes we have seen since the beginning of 2004, and a bit leading up to the new year.