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Section Two
Search Engine History: Understanding How the Industry Has Evolved Much of the Internet evolved out of Yahoo!, a search directory that categorized websites.
Users would browse Yahoo!, as opposed to the "search" function that followed. Businesses
used to be able to simply submit their company information and web address to the Yahoo!
directory and get listed, resulting in a lot of new traffic to their site. Soon search engines
began competing with the directory, allowing people to search for what they wanted from a
database instead. If your website was listed among the top of these search results, your
traffic level would spike. As the internet grew, the percentage of users "searching" for things
would eclipse the number of people "browsing" for things. It became very important very quickly to attain a top position on the search engines. An entire
industry (Search Engine Optimization, or SEO) was born out of this quest to become the
number one ranked website listing for the keywords people were searching on. In the early
days, optimizers used techniques such as stuffing a page with keywords or hiding keywords
in the same color as the background of the page. As the search engines caught on, they
started improving their search logic so that these methods did not work anymore. They do
this because manipulating a page's code to get a top position was always contrary to the goal
of the search engines - which was and still is delivering the most relevant results. Today's search engine uses a complex scientific algorithm to find the most relevant content.
The most popular search engine, Google, uses a formula that also takes into account the
number of incoming links that a site has -- rationalizing that a site that has a large number of
high-quality links must be a good resource, and thus should be ranked higher. Of course,
marketers were hip to this and started to manipulate the link counts to their sites through link
farms, free-for-all link pages, and even by buying link positions on other sites. Google
claims it can identify bought links, but how much it relies on “tattle tales” versus an actual
adjustment to its algorithm is anyone’s guess. Search engines like Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) accept natural language queries such as
"Who won the World Series in 1918?" and display matching results. Localization and
personalization are some of the industry buzzwords that crop up in the beta sites of Google
and Yahoo now. Google also extends their search to your personal computer files, and allows you to send a
text message via your cell phone and receive a return text message with a matching
business name, location and phone#. Since going public, Google has been releasing a frenzy
of new products and services. Most of their money now is made via pay per click advertising
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