In the beginning (1993) there was Yahoo and very little else. Yahoo really was the first search engine, even though it wasn’t a search engine at all. Yahoo was a directory. Directories and search engines are different.
Several real search engines came on the scene shortly after Yahoo started up. It seemed like each one, in turn, was going to be the final answer. Then sent out their little software spiders to find the content of sites all over the Web. If they found metatags on a site, they used that information to help categorize the site and determine how to describe it. Then came Google.
Google was founded in 1998, when the Internet Bubble was still bubbling. Google had a novel principle for page ranking. The idea was that a site would be ranked based on the number and quality of the sites that linked to it. It didn’t pay attention to those metatags at all. That idea worked like a charm.
Folks liked the results they got using Google and they liked the simple design. Google quickly became the most popular search engine on the Web, so much so that its name has been turned into a verb, “to google.”
Other search sites looked at Google's success and started making changes. The directories added search engines and the search engines added directories. That means that now the directory/search engine difference is no longer a distinction between sites.
The Internet Bubble burst and suddenly all these sites that thought they could get by with attracting visitors had to start actually making money. To do that they had to start charging for things. Many of them started charging for listings. Some others went out of business.
They also started looking at their costs and suddenly the idea of developing a search engine or directory for their site didn’t make a lot of business sense. So lots of search sites started using results from other sites to bolster their own data. Yahoo, for example, made a deal with Google and Google supplied its search engine results so that they appear on Yahoo.
Search engines also started using some kind of popularity factor as part of the formula they used for determining page rankings. After all, if it worked for Google, it must be good.
So here's how things are now, in July of 2003, after a couple of years of Bubble-busting shakeout. Each one has some implications for your site promotion strategy.
