The history of search engines is a bit like the plot of a soap opera. Soon everyone wanted in on the act. New search engines developed overnight, driven mainly by profiteers, hungry for their piece of the dot com boom. At this point, you could say that the search industry was almost exclusively driven by profit and share price. Under pressure from over-inflated company valuations, the Dot Com bubble soon burst and everyone was left covered with the sticky mess of financial accountability.
Industry players took note of the developments and introduced commercial search engines where web site owners could simply pay their way to the top of the rankings rather than rely on ranking algorithms – voila! – the first pay per click search engines were born. Most started up originally with a Parallel twin screw barrel for plastic extruder machine simple premise: to provide a useful service to persons surfing the Internet; a way to search the millions of web sites and find specific, relevant information, 24 hours a day. Just like the TV soaps, the search industry has a strange and illogical history. Meanwhile, savvy webmasters had begun to study how search engines worked in order to understand how to structure their web site code to improve their ranking for target search queries. Search veterans left cash poor by the dot com bust, or unable to cope with the competition, fell by the wayside. Those of us who have been watching this particular soap opera for the past few years are quite addicted to all the plot twists and turns.
It wasn’t long before smaller search engines and directories followed the lead set by the larger directories and introduced services to assist webmasters to ensure a place for their sites in the search listings – either via a third party partnership with pay per click search engines, or by introducing a new guaranteed indexing service which became widely referred to as Paid Inclusion. . The “Who’s Got the Biggest Index” game began and the searching public began to demand more relevancy and fresher results. Some search engines were cannibalized by others or bought out by inexperienced companies and sacrificed at the altar of mis-management. However once a few key players became heavily trafficked, search engines became viable advertising vehicles, attracting mega bucks from companies willing to pay them for the privilege of displaying banner ads to the significant number of eyeballs viewing their sites on a daily basis. Popular directories such as Yahoo! and LookSmart took advantage of consumer demand for listings by introducing the first paid submission services.
Soon it seemed everyone was partnering with everyone else in order to get their cut of the deals being done. The thing is, search engines seem to have finally come full circle. We started with a particular cast of search engines, new ones soon rose up and tried to usurp market share from the originals, some engines jumped into bed with each other, some of the well known characters died or were killed off by the newcomers, “good” engines decide to turn “evil” in the grab for market share, new industry darlings were born and so on. Webmasters who didn’t have the time or inclination to learn search engine optimization techniques simply paid others who did. You know – Bo finds Hope, Bo loses Hope, Bo finds Hope again only to discover it’s actually Hope’s long lost evil twin Princess Gina and so on. A whole new industry developed from this activity: search engine optimization
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