Internet Search

The history of search is fascinating because initially, no one would have suspected an upstart like Google would dominate search engines the way they have over the past few years. However, looking back, they were the ones who first started to understand what customers wanted. By looking at this history, as search engine marketers, we can understand how to improve our rankings and stay current with Google’s upcoming requirements.

1995 was the dawn of search engines. Two years after Aliweb, search engines became mainstream and big business. Excite and AltaVista both launched in 1995, along with the less well-known MetaCrawler, Magellan and Daum. But the most significant success was Yahoo, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo.

Yahoo! started as a traditional web directory in 1994 by two Stanford University graduates, then launching a search engine in 1995. To the annoyance of their lesser-known rivals, Yahoo didn’t build any significant new technology. They bought and borrowed third-party tech until the acquisition of Inktomi (a search engine for hire) in 2002. The success of Yahoo was all packaging, with a fun brand and a user-friendly interface.

Internet-connected computers started to become widely accessible in schools, libraries and homes across the globe. A new generation began using websites more than books, and search engines more than web directories. Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos dominated, with significant investment propping up the loss-making sites. RankDex is the basis of every major search engine’s ranking algorithm today, predating Google’s “PageRank” by two years and being referenced in Larry Page’s first patent. Without RankDex, search engines may still be using keywords, not links, as their primary ranking factor today. Just as Boo.com was “before its time” in e-commerce (3D rotating product images in 1998?!), Ask Jeeves was before its time in the search. The search engine was launched in 1997, with a unique ability to answer questions.

Up until now, users had to carefully think about which “keywords” to search for on AltaVista, Yahoo and Excite, to get a useful page of results back. A typical search engine would give equal weighting and importance to each word in a question, often returning irrelevant results. Ask Jeeves was able to extract the essential terms and primary intent of a problem, yielding much more relevant results. It became hugely popular with the growing number of non-techies surfing the web, who were not used to thinking like a computer.

In 2010, Ask made its search team redundant and outsourced to another search engine provider. The search engine technology Teoma that they acquired, struggled with ranking and indexing relevant pages on an ever-expanding web. Revenue generation also seemed to take priority over User Experience. Adverts consumed the search result pages when Google at the time had a clean, fast and relatively ad-free appearance. Any computer-related search query on Ask Jeeves would return a page covered in Dell adverts, making the organic results challenging to find.

A year after throwing in the towel on search technology, Ask’s CEO, Doug Leeds, said they still provided search to over 100 million people every month. Perhaps if Ask kept developing their technology, they’d be a leader in voice search today, where question-based searches are key. Originally named “Backrub” for its link-based ranking algorithm, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. A play on the term “googol” (10 to the power of 100), the company had big ambitions from the outset. Page and Brin got a seed investment of $100,000 by Sun Microsystems co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim, before the company was even incorporated. The seed funding round raised a total of $1 million, the majority of which came from three key investors. One of those investors was Jeff Bezos, the founder of an up and coming online bookstore called Amazon.

Google came relatively late to the search party, building upon several existing ideas in 1996 and launching at the end of 1997. Other search engines were starting to suffer from spam and relevancy issues, which was to become Google’s golden bullet and the secret to their success. In 2003, Yahoo bought Overture for $1.63 billion. It secured the ad platform that drove most of Yahoo’s revenue, as well as increasing their market share with the portfolio of search engines that Overture had previously acquired. Then in 2004, Google settled the lawsuit with recently acquired Overture, offering Yahoo 2.7 million GOOG shares as compensation. Yahoo struggled over the years to come, making low investments, acquisitions, and business priorities. Blogging, Photo Sharing, and Auction websites were acquired and then left to whither while competing websites became billion-dollar businesses. Search users left in droves, as did the partner search engines that were previously powered by Yahoo.

Finally, in 2017, the company was acquired by Verizon for just $4.5 billion. Nothing symbolizes panic and indecisiveness better than Microsoft’s fall into the search engine world. MSN Search launched in 1998 in the wake of Google when Microsoft’s Windows operating system was used by over 90% of Americans. In 2004, Microsoft finally gave ‘search’ the investment that it needed, building in-house search engine technology and putting it live in 2005. MSN’s most significant success at the time was in the B2B world that Microsoft was comfortable in. They offered their technology to other search engines, internet providers, and portals, gaining market share and a cut of advertising revenues. Just one year later, the company rebranded its search engine again, removing the “Windows” reference and calling it “Live Search.”