The Timeline of Search Engine Industry

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:38:33 +0000

The following data were adopted from The History of Search [How Finding Stuff in the Web Became a $20 Billion Business] :

||  Yahoo!  ||  LookSmart  ||  DMOZ  ||  GoTo  ||  Overture  ||  Inktomi  ||  Webcrawler  ||  Lycos  ||  AltaVista  ||
||  HotBot  ||  Ask  ||  MSN  ||  Live Search  ||  Bing  ||  BackRub  ||  Google  ||  Google AdWords  ||
||  Google AdSense  ||  Google Caffeine  ||

February 1994 – David Filo and Jerry Yang created “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.

April 1994 – The Guide was renamed as Yahoo!, an acronym for “yetAnother Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

February 1999 – The Yahoo! Directory offered an expedited review service called “Business Express” for a one time fee of $199.

December 2001 – Yahoo shifted to charging $299 per year for directory listings. Being in the directory was a big key to getting search traffic because Yahoo! has such a large search market-share at the time.

June 2001 – Yahoo! also created many regionalized versions of their web directory over the years, but recently announced the closure of many of them, including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

June 1998 – LookSmart was launched.

April 2001 – LookSmart acquired the free volunteer web directory, Zeal $20 million

April 2002 – LookSmart evolved the directory business model by having multiple ways to charge. Flat fee for inclusion and an option that charged by the click.

LookSmart had distribution deals with syndicated their ads and results to many major web portals.

October 2003 – LookSmart announced that MSN did not renew their deal, which expired in early 2004, and was the beginning of the end for LookSmart.

June 1998 – GNUhoo launched as a volunteer edited directory, as webmasters were frustrated with the slow review times at the Yahoo! Directory.

July 1998 – Richard Stallman objected to the GNU so it became Newhoo. Yahoo objected to the Hoo so it became the Open Directory Project. It’s also called Dmoz after it’s original domain, directory.mozilla.org.

February 1998 – Bill Gross launched GoTo, a search ad network that charged advertisers in an open auction starting at 1 cent per click.

Rather than building itself as the destination website, GoTo felt they could get more distribution if they did not compete directly against their ad syndication partners, who were AOL, Alta Vista, MSN, and thousands of smaller affiliates.

October 2001 – GoTo announced their first profitable quarter and charged their name to Overture.

November 2001 – Yahoo|! begins syndicating Overture results.

February 2003 – Overture bought Alta Vista and AllTheWeb search engines to build an all-in-one search service.

July 2003 – Yahoo! purchased Overture for $1.6 billion.

1994 – The US Department of Defense paid for research into creating cheaper super-computers.

1996 – Dr. Eric Brewer used this research to launch Inktomi, a search index and Infrastructure company.

Much like Overture, Inktomi saw itself as a service to be syndicated, rather than building itself into a destination. Inktomi’s results were syndicated to many top portals including Yahoo! and MSN.

June 2000 – Inktomi’s share price slid when Yahoo! announced they were replacing it with Google technology.

August 2000 – Inktomi announced they were starting a flat rate paid inclusion program.

September 2001 – Brett Tabke found that inktomi accidentally allowed public access to the backend of their editorial database which highlighted search spam.

December 2002 – Yahoo! purchased Inktomi for $235 million.

February 2004 – Yahoo! launched a new search technology based on integrating pieces from Inktomi, AllTheWeb and AltaVista.

Yahoo! continued Inktomi’s controversial paid inclusion program until January 2010. When that ended, it largely concluded the paid inclusion search business model in regular search results for general web search engines.

However, the rise of vertical search may see it return.

April 1994 – WebCrawler was launched, but later sold to AOL in June 1995, and then sold to Excite in April 1997. In January, 1999, Excite was bought by @Home for $6.5 billion, who filed for bankruptcy in October 2001. In Novermber, Infospace and iWon purchased Excite’s assets at auction for $10 nillion. It’s currently owned by IAC, parent company of Ask.

July 20, 1994 – Lycos was launched and grew largely through the same portal strategy which killed many other search engines. In May of 2000, Terra Networks signed a deal to buy Lycos for $12.5 billion in stock. Four years later, Lycos was sold to Daum for $95.4 million in cash.

December 15, 1995 – AltaVista was launched and was the first fast searchable full web index. It was the dominant search leader before Google. But DEC & Compaq neglected AltaVista as a search engine & tried to build a yet another web portal – which failed miserably. In February 2003, AltaVista was bought for $140 million by Overture who has bought Yahoo! five months later.

May 1996 – HotBot was launched and was originally popular due to its association with Wired Magazine. Lycos acquired it in 1998 and it faded along with Lycos.

April 1997 – Ask was launched as a natural language search service using human editors. Over time they moved to using Direct Hit and then Teoma’s technology. Of the third tier search services, Ask is perhaps the only one which has managed to keep 3% of the search marketshare.

After Yahoo! buys Inktomi and Overture, Microsoft begins building their own search technology.

July 2004 – A limited technology preview became available.

September 2006 – Live Search replaced MSN Search.

May 2009 – After watching their search marketshare erode for years, Microsoft launched a search-only brand named Bing.

July 2009 – Yahoo! signed a 10-year exclusive deal to syndicate Microsoft search results and search ads.

July 2010 – Microsoft’s program of bribing searchers with a cashback options was closed after two years of failing to create a brand loyalty.

Bing’s search resultshave the right rail ads closer to the organic search results. Google cloned this layout and saw a significant rise in search clicks.

Bing has focused on trying to win marketshare through data licensing deals in areas like entertainment and travel. With Google owning YouTube and buying ITA Software and Metaweb, they are also pushing aggressively into vertical search.

1996 – While Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on a search project called BackRub. Their big advancement in the field of search is incorporating advanced link analysis to rank documents based on the number and quality of inbound links.

1997 – They rename BackRub to Google.

June 2000 – Google announced partnership to power Yahoo! search’s organic results.

October 2000 – The first version of AdWords is launched with CPM priced ads and relevancy scores based on ad clicks.

August 2001 – Amit Singhal helped rewrite their relevance algorithms to make it easier to add new ranking criteria.

February 2002 – AdWords get a major revamp, with cost-per-click based ad pricing. Unlike Overture, Google’s advertiser bid prices are not shared publicly, and they used clickthrough rates to reward relevant ads.

Summer 2002 – Yahoo! offered to buy Google for $3 billion.

Summer 2003 – Google changed their index to allow incremental index updates, rather than doing large batch updates.

March 2003 – Google launched their targeted ad network. A couple of weeks later, they bought Applied Semantics, the creators of AdSense.

April 2004 – Google announced discounting of content ad prices with smart pricing.

August 2004 – Google settled an IP lawsuit from (then Yahoo! owned) Overture.

June 2005 – Google introduced personalized search results, which help rank sites that you vist often higher in the search results.

August 2005 – Google AdWords introduced a “quality score” which further allowed them to add relevancy and other criteria to ad picing.

May 2007 – Google introduced Universal Search, which lets them integrate data from vertical databases like vido, image, local, and news directly in the regular search results.

2005-2010 – Google acquires Urchin Analytics, YouTube, DoubleClick, and AdMob to increase their ad inventory and own more of the internet advertising infrastructure.

October 2009 – Google launched comparison ads, a post per action lead generation program which targets big money markets like mortgages and credit cards.

Q4, 2009 – Google terminated 30,000 of their advertisers, roughly 5% of the total. Almost all of them were affiliates.

December 2009 – Google incorporated Tweets and other data sources into real-time search. The push toward real-time updating of their index was completed with the launch of their Caffeine index in June of 2010.

Why SEO Is Must For All Business?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:12:54 +0000

Any online business needs more people to visit your site and this quality traffic is improved by ranking higher in the search engines. The result will increase the sales and ensures continuous success in online business.

For any online business to flourish, you must have customers. In order to increase your sales, you need to increase your number of customers and this is achievable by increasing the traffic to your website through SEO process.

How are keywords important in SEO process?

People looking for information will end up on your website only through their keywords. Choosing appropriate target keywords will really drive your desired rankings and is the first step in your search engine marketing campaign.

How will the SEO process help you in increasing sales?

SEO process will help you in bringing more visitors and ultimately convert those visitors into customers. With every increase in your customer list, your sale also grows up. The amount of money you put in will have a better return, which is nothing but Return on Investment (ROI).

What is ROI?

For the money put in by an enterprise, ROI (Return On Investment) is the profit or cost saving that is realized. The overall ROI of an enterprise is used as an indicator to show how well a company is managed.

Can you describe briefly the SEO process?

Search Engine Optimization is basically a process of making a website search engine friendly. The process actually involves some changes that are designed to help the site rank higher in the organic search engine results. Our SEO process will make sure your company gets a brand value name to sell products online, generating leads, providing information/education to your visitors and increasing traffic.

Why do you need a professional SEO services to take care of your Internet marketing goals?

Search engines use complicated algorithms to determine how they spider the pages, index and rank the sites in search engine result pages. To add to this, these algorithms keep changing over time. While you can follow various tips and do it yourself, keep in mind ranking high in search engines for a consistent long period of time, requires special care and attention. Therefore it is better for you to leave the SEO to professionals, for your continuing success in online marketing.

What are the benefits at SEO-Silverado?

Our team comprises of highly professional and innovative individuals with commitment and zeal to achieve total customer satisfaction. You will experience the complete SEO with true rankings and all your Internet marketing goals are satisfied.?

SEO Silverado Services

The Timeline of Search Engine Industry

Why SEO Is Must For All Business?