« Thief From Japan | Main | US makes History: First photos of Mercury since 1974! »
Learn SEO: History of Search
By Kimberly Bock | January 15, 2008
This is just a tiny tidbit of history for us newbies to chew on…
Implementation of search engine optimization began in the 90’s. It is still very new and constantly growing, changing, improving.
At first, SEO was less complicated. A URL was submitted and a spider would crawl the page, gathering links and extracting data.
The page was downloaded and stored on a server. Then something called an indexer would pull information from the page..text, the location, the weight of the text keywords/keyword phrases, links throughout the page, etc..Once that was complete, the information was scheduled to be crawled once again.
Of course, once positions in the SERP’s improved, obviously webmasters and site owners were thrilled by the onslaught of attention their site began to receive because they were now being seen!
As time has moved up and onward, search engines have constantly upgraded their algorithms to make sure that only the most relevant pages are shown in the SERP’s upon submission of user queries.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders and multi multi billionaires) developed a search engine called “Backrub” which was based upon a mathematical algorithm to find relevant pages. They are responsible for PageRank.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. By this time webmasters had already created link building tools and strategy to influence the Inktomi search engine (Yahoo! took over Inktomi and it became Overture), which seemed favorable since they were seeing proof of it’s success in the SERP’s.
This is also where link spamming began to experience it’s first breath.
Google has changed things quite a bit and have said that there are over 200 factors considered in Page Ranking. Google, Yahoo!, and Live search keep “In the know” out in the pasture where algorithm processes are concerned.
Excellent resources for insight into search algorithm, patenting information, and otherwise meaty SEO goodies include:
Bill Slawski - SEO By The Sea
Aaron Wall - SEO Book
Jill Whalen - Natural Search Blog
Well there’s your tidbit of history!
Until next time, have fun learning SEO!
Topics: Search History |
January 16th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I know nothing about SEO and am feeling like I really should know more. That is a great start for me. Thanks!
January 17th, 2008 at 5:24 am
I’m glad it was useful kristen! I love hearing that..
It can be very exciting can’t it?
There are so many more things to add to the kitty concerning SEO history..
Stay tuned, I am sure at some point I’ll be adding more posts in reference to it.