1990
The World Wide Web, First Website and First Search Engine
The World Wide Web, the first website and the first search engine have all appeared within the timespan of a year. Incidentally, the first search engine, a small project by a McGill University student in Montreal, was the one to precede the other two. These three concepts were tied together from the very start and have been heavily reliant on each other ever since.
The First Few Thousand Websites
The first websites for general public use began to emerge between 1993–94.
1994
Thousands of Search Engines Failed
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the internet was ambushed by a mountain of search engines, each with its own cataloguing techniques, search algorithms, target audiences and all kinds of special features. Two decades later, it is now safe to say that all, but one of them, have failed.
Understanding the World’s Knowledge
The vast majority of early Search Engines had fairly narrow targeting, which meant you had to use different search engines for different things. All of them relied heavily on Webmasters to understand what the content was about which raised a whole set of issues, but most importantly SPAM.
2. Match it to Users Needs
All Search Engines were a mixture of Search Engines, Directories, News Sites, and Catalogues, among other things, tampering with users’ needs at every interaction. In other words, the Search Engines grew better at cataloguing the world’s knowledge, but it happened at the expense of matching it to users’ needs.
3. Instantly!
The special features and excessive advertising raised the search loading speeds. Most search engines hosted an index of websites and webpages that would sometimes take weeks or months to update. In effect, search results took a long time to load and once the search results appeared some of the content was no longer available or modified beyond the point of relevance.
The First Few Million Websites
The World Wide Web hit 1 million websites at some point in 1997. As you might expect, getting any kind of additional interesting facts about those times becomes increasingly more difficult.
1998
One Search Engine Succeeded
It wasn’t until the publication of an academic paper called ‘The Anatomy of a Largescale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ by the muscovite Sergey Brin in 1998 which grew into today’s Google, that the idea of search engine really took flight. At first, Google was hardly any better than the other search engines, it was mediocre at understanding the content it was indexing and it wasn’t a leader in matching it to user needs, either. However, it has spread its dominance over the search engine game almost overnight, which is most often attributed to its slick user interface that had virtually no features.
In the long haul, what allowed the equation of Google to Web Search in the minds of billions was exactly what all the other search engines failed at – that initial vision of:
• understanding the world’s knowledge
• matching it to users’ needs
• seamlessly
The crucial factor has been their ability to understand information in increasing depth, with limited reliance on Webmasters and match it to user needs in a manner that is universal and rich and with increasing accuracy over time, through what we most commonly know today as algorithm updates to their search engine.
They delivered on the instancy aspect too, by making today’s search results virtually real-time. In simple terms, as a result, Google has managed to accomplish what none of the other search engines did: Return a fairly relevant collection of links for almost any search query, instantly.
The First Billion Users
It might come as a shock, but it took search engines less than 10 years to get to a billion users.
2005
The Relationship Between the Search Engine and SEO
As search engines turned mainstream, manipulating them for commercial gain has become the informal definition of SEO and its outcomes widely considered to be Web-SPAM. By the year 2005, Google started to take Web-SPAM very seriously and hasn’t stopped working on it ever since.
At the same time, they empowered webmasters with tools to drive commercial value through relevance to their customers as opposed to unethical practices.
• Launched Google Analytics and Google Search Console that allowed website owners to better understand the behaviour of their customers online
• Started supporting initiatives on content mark-up that aided search engines to better understand the knowledge behind the information:
▫ Sitemaps and robots.txt files to give webmasters control of what gets indexed
▫ Canonical tags and pagination to fight duplicate content and aid content attribution
▫ Structured Data (schema.org vocabulary) to aid the understanding of semantics
• Put an emphasis on branding to increase the websites’ commitment to their online presence
▫ Started taking reviews into account
▫ Started using signals from social media
• Made the web relevant to our location and our devices
• Punished unethical SEO practices like
▫ Keyword-stuffing and over-optimisation
▫ Link-farms and paid links
▫ Duplicate content and thin content
The First Trillion Pages
At some point before 2010, Google has revealed that their index at the time was already storing some 1 trillion pages.
2010
Intent-Based Search and Rich Search Results
Although Google’s war on SPAM has continued, it also started stretching the idea of what search can accomplish, putting users’ search intent at the centre. By increasing its:
• Understanding of semantics and ability to recognise context in order to
• Measure user behaviour, Google has learned to understand and anticipate user intent on an individual basis and thus increase the accuracy with which they can match content to search queries.
In simple terms, returning a fairly relevant collection of links for almost any search query has, as a result, been replaced by returning the web’s single most relevant resource, which is able to fully solve the search query.
Some of the newly developed technologies:
• Autosuggest
• SERP-features and site-links
• Mobile and local
• Encryption and security,
• Machine learning (RankBrain)
• Policy on interstitials
The First Trillion Yearly Google Searches
At a point before 2015, Google has revealed that they get at least a trillion searches per year, a number that has been growing ever since.
2015
The Advent of Real-Time
In 2015, Google announced that you’re able to get almost any data on what’s happening in real time.
Half of the World Population on Search
By 2016, according to some sources, the World Wide Web had 1 billion websites and over half the world’s population using search engines. However, as it happens, more than 80% of these websites are inactive.
2020
BERT Language Interpretation
Although BERT was introduced before 2020, it was rolled out over a number of consecutive years. Google claims that BERT has helped the search engine “understand searches better than ever before”.
Any efforts directed at a website in the public domain that are not naturally geared towards fulfilling these underlying principles, will become a SEO liability in the long run.
Sergiu George