Brief History of Search
History can be boring but a concise overview of search engine history can help business owners understand the importance of using them for marketing purposes.
Search engines didn't come along with the birth of the web. At first, people had to go from link to link in order to access different pages. That meant that they had to have a starting point, a page with external links that would take them to other pages with other external links and so on. Jumping from link to link was no one's idea of fun and it made browsing quite difficult.
It wasn't until 1990 that the first archive of Internet documents was created. It had the option to search through the database for specific pages that matched certain criteria. And that's how it all started. For users, this was the breakthrough point to accessing information easily. The usefulness of search engines is undeniable. It has changed the way we access information on the web and our expectations of the Internet.
Evolution of Search
The number of web pages indexed by search engines was nowhere near as large as it is today. That's why people used generic keywords such as "cars", "flowers" etc to search for information that was of interest to them.
The number of returned pages grew and grew (and hasn't stop growing). It became increasingly difficult to find exactly what you were looking for by typing in a generic keyword. Bit by bit, users learned that they could cut down the time it took to look up information by becoming more specific in their searches. For example, "red cars" would bring up specific information about red cars instead of general information about cars.
Modern surfers use specific keyphrases that comprise of 2, 3, 4 or even 5 words. User behaviour has evolved a lot and has changed in a good way. Major search engines have developed search commands to help users further and reach specific information more quickly: search filters block unwanted or potentially harmful sites, searching by language, searching sites that comply with certain criteria such as keywords in the title of the page, etc.
The Search Engine Market
The search engine business has grown to the point where it has its own market and is a
Show Me the Traffic!
Advertisers have become aware of the benefits of search engine traffic. They have come up with ways, some ethical and some not, to make the most of it.
That's how search engine optimisation first came to be: altering pages in relation to algorithm factors in order to improve rankings in search engines. The better rankings a site had, the larger the number of people that visited the site. That still applies today.
Unethical practices are regarded as spam because they seek to cheat or trick the algorithms and search engine users.
Many business owners believe search engine optimisation is about obtaining results by tricking search engines. There are, of course, unethical practitioners of optimisation, but properly conducted SEO is essentially different. In today's search engine world, search engine optimisation means so much more than just altering a web page, it's a complex marketing strategy aimed at achieving long term success by using search engines in an ethical way.
This article was first published on 03 August 2004 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
