History of search engines, part I
June 16th, 2006 • Posted by Bill Bice • Permalink
A couple of guys at Stanford created a list of their favorite websites in "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994. This turned into Yahoo in 1995, and gave us all a way to actually find stuff on the web. You had to get into the Yahoo directory if you wanted anyone to actually find your website. (This is back when search engine optimization was easy — get listed in Yahoo).
Next came the first wave of real search engines like WebCrawler, AltaVista, Infoseek and Hotbot — you could actually search the full-text of websites. It just didn't work that well for finding relevant information. If you wanted your website to turn up for a particular search, all you had to do was stuff your site with those keywords.
Go to 1997, where a couple of more guys from Stanford come up with a simple but brilliant idea: use the links between web pages to determine their relevancy. This was PageRank, and the birth of Google. Google produced more relevant results than the other search engines, and quickly become a rising star, turning that into real revenue with AdWords.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been the same.
In the tradition of Mel Brooks, there will be no Part II. But we are going to talk a lot about SEO and how it can help your spa.
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