A brief history of search engines
With the development of the Internet, the emergence of search engines is inevitable. Just like a traditional library, there are more books and files in the collection, and management and searching are bound to be difficult. Indexing and searching become necessary. In fact, the principles of search engines are largely derived from traditional document retrieval techniques.
The amount of online resources is far beyond our personal imagination and control. Without search engines, we can hardly use these resources effectively, and there is no Internet today.
Today's social media is in full swing. The number of users, website traffic, and social influence of applications such as Weibo, WeChat, Facebook, and Twitter have reached or even surpassed Internet giants such as Baidu and Google. There is such a tendency and point of view that netizens now rely more on Weibo, Facebook, and Twitter to find information than search engines. Maybe search engines are outdated?
SEOs don’t have to worry about it. Perhaps Google and Baidu will decline and disappear, but search engines will not. Even if Weibo, WeChat, Facebook.Twitter are hot, or some new network services appear in the future, when users want to find information, they must enter the key in the search box, or enter the voice input in the mobile Internet era. This is still search. However, the source of search information may be changed from the page indexed by the search engine to the database to be blog. The internal database of Facebook and Twitter. The ranking algorithm has changed from page relevance and links to the recommendation level and comments of friends, but the data source and algorithm No change will change the user's need for the search function, nor will it change the basic form of search.
As long as the search exists, there will be the question of which information is ranked first, and there will be SEO. Maybe the name of the search engine has changed, and SEO just needs to change the name.
Search is one of the fastest-changing areas of the Internet in the past 20 years. This change is not only reflected in the rapid advancement of search technology and the huge promotion of the Internet economy, but also the combination of search engines themselves, and the rise and fall of the search engines are also exciting and often exciting. There is a sense of dazzling and dumbfounding.
Understanding the development history of search engines helps SEO personnel understand the development and transformation of search engine marketing and have more accurate expectations for the future. This section briefly lists important events in the history of search engine development, many of which have a vital impact on today's search and the shape of the SEO industry.
the year 1990
Archie, the first Internet search engine, appeared to search for files on FTP servers. At that time, the Web based on the HTTP protocol had not yet appeared.
1993
June
The first Wcb search engine, World Wide Web Wanderer, appeared. It only collected URLs and did not index file contents.
October
The second Web search engine, ALIWEB, appeared and began to index file meta-information (that is
, information such as title and label ), and the main content of the file has not yet been indexed.
1994
January
Infoscek was founded, and its search service was officially launched later. Infoseek is one of the most important search engines in the early days, allowing webmasters to submit URLs from Infoseek. Baidu founder Robin Li is one of Infoseek's core engineers.
April
Yahoo! was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang (杨致远). At that time, the yahoo.conl domain name had not been registered, and the website was built on the domain name of Stanford University. Yahoo! was not a real search engine at first, but a manually edited website directory. The founder personally listed the collected valuable websites in the Yahoo! directory. When the number of websites is not large, manual editing can be realized, which not only provides convenience for users, but also promotes the quality of information. Yahoo! quickly grows into a giant of the Internet.
WetCrawler, the first full-text search engine (all contents of indexed files) was launched.
It started as a research project at the University of Washington. In 1995, it was acquired by AOL AOL, and in 1996, it was acquired by Exie. In 2001, it stopped developing its own search technology, and the website became a meta search engine (integrated and displayed multiple third-party search results, known as meta search engine).
June
Lycos was founded and quickly became one of the most popular search engines
the year 1995
January
yahoo.com city name registration. In April, Yahoo! Company was formally established.
December
The Excitc search engine was officially launched and became one of the early popular search engines. In 2001, its parent company went bankrupt and was purchased by InfoSpace. Acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004.
AltaVista was founded and quickly became the most popular search engine, which was called Google at that time.
AltaVista has done a lot of pioneering work in the search field, and page ranking is based on site factors. The webmaster submitted the URL and included it very quickly.
Infoseek became the default search engine of Netscape browser. Netscape, Netscape, the absolute ruler of the browser market at the time, once accounted for more than 90% of the market share. Later, with the release of the free Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, it declined. In 2008, the research and development and technical support were officially stopped.
1996
March
Google started a research project at Stanford University as founders Lary Page and Sergey Brin.
The name was BackRub at the time, and it was renamed Google in 1997.
April
Yahoo! is listed.
May
Inkomi was founded as an important early search technology provider. There is no search website or interface for users, but it provides search technology to other companies. Inkomi first started paying for inclusion, but it was later proved to be unworkable by Google and others.
Hotbot was created, using Inktomi data at the beginning. Acquired by Lycos in 1998, it was later transformed into a meta search engine, displaying results from Google. FAST, Teoma, and Inktomi. It was also one of the most popular search engines in the early days.
November
Lyeos collected 60 million files and became the largest search engine at the time. Compared with today's search engine database, it is really insignificant.
1997
April
Ask Jeeves. was launched and renamed Ask in 2006. It is the only early search engine that still exists and has a certain market share. The feature advertised when it was founded is "natural language" search, and users can search in the form of intermittent sentences. At first, a large number of editors were hired to manually edit search results. Obviously (at least today it seems obvious), this model did not work, and later had to use other search engine data.
1998
February 21
GoTo (later renamed Overture) officially started Pay For Placemnent (sell search results location) service, whoever pays more will be ranked first. It was criticized at the time, but it was the ancestor of search bidding advertising (Baidu promotion and Google Adwords, etc.), the main source of income for all mainstream search engines.
Created by Direet Hit, the user click-through rate of search results is an important part of its ranking factor. Direet Hit was popular for a while, but it soon caused a sharp drop in search quality. Today’s search engine algorithms introduce user browsing data, and search engines have explored and left lessons in the early days. If they are not handled well, they will be used by cheaters.
In mid-1998, Disney became the holding company of Ifosek, transforming Infoseck into a portal. Early search engines did not have a clear profit model. When they encountered difficulties such as reduced search quality and no income, they often used the method of transforming into a portal, hoping to make money from online display advertising like Yaboo!, but there were few successful examples of transformation. This has provided a lesson for the latecomers such as Google to insist on improving search technology and insisting on the core search business of simplicity.
Also in 1998. AltaVista was sold to Compaq. In October 1999, Compaq also transformed AltaVista into a portal, and AltaVista was in decline.
In mid-1998, Yaboo! abandoned AlaVista, which was used in 1996, and used Inkomi search data instead. In the early days, Yloo only displayed data from real search engines when there were no sites that users were looking for in its directory.
September
Google is formally established.
MSN search is launched. However, Microsoft did not pay much attention to search engines for a long time. Until 2004, MSN Search was using search data and technologies from other providers.
Year 1999
May
AllTheWeb.com was created as a platform for search technology company FAST to showcase its technology.
June
Netscape gave up Exciter and started using Google to search for purple data, which is a milestone for Google.
In mid-1999, Disney transferred Infoseek traffic to Go.com, and the once popular search engine Infoseck disappeared. Go.com has gone through several twists and turns, and is currently silent.
Lycos stopped its own search technology and started using AIlTheWeb data.
2000
January
Aak Jeeves acquired the search engine Direct Hit for US$500 million, but did not develop further. Direct Hit officially ended in early 2002.
On January 18. Baidu was established. As a search technology provider, Qiwu provides Chinese citation services and data to other websites.
May
Lycos was acquired by the Spanish company Terra Networks and was renamed Tera Lycos. After the Internet bubble burst, Terra Lycos gradually declined.
July
Yahoo! began to use Google search data to cultivate its strongest competitors in the future with its strongest online crystal brand and traffic.
In the middle of 2000, GoTo.com basically abandoned the practice of attracting users with its own website, and began to provide paid search services to many search engines and websites, including MetaCrawler.com, DogPile.com, Ask Jeeves, AOL, Netscape, etc. This may be one of the major mistakes GoTo.com (later Overture), and with a ground-breaking model, and its pioneers brand name no ordinary user can know, and therefore this can not be a household with Google
knows, Brand contends.
October
Google launched AdWords to provide search advertising services under the CPM model, that is, pay per display. This model was not successful.
2001
September
Ask Jeeves acquired Teoma, a search engine that values links as much as Google. It was once considered one of the search engines that might compete with Google.
October
Baidu was officially launched as a search engine, providing search services directly and independently. Chinese search quickly entered the Baidu era.
year 2002
March
Google Adwords launched the PPC form, that is, pay-per-click, which has become the mainstream of Adwords today. PPC search advertising was invented by Overure and carried forward by Coogle. Starting from PPC, Google Adwords is truly accepted and widely used by customers, and Google has become an online money-making machine that makes full use of search.
May
AOL AOL abandoned Inktomi and started using Google to search data.
October
Yahoo! abandoned the practice of returning the data in the Yahoo! directory first when users search, and completely changed to display Google search data. The Yahoo! directory is still the most important website directory, but obviously there are fewer and fewer users.
December
Yahoo!'s acquisition of Inktomi, which had no good profit model, kicked off a series of acquisitions and integration in 2003. Yahoo! obviously wants to have its own search technology and does not want to continue to rely on other search engines such as Google
Year 2003
February 18
Overture announced the acquisition of AltaVista. In addition to the advertising platform, Overture also has its own
search technology.
February 25
Overture announced the acquisition of FAST's search technology department. FAST owns AllTheWeb.com and also provides search data to Lyoos, another well-known search site.
Oveture therefore owned the two major search technology companies at the time.
March
Coogle launched a content advertising system later called Adsense to provide advertising
services to other content websites , becoming one of the main sources of income for many content websites
July
Yahoo! announced the acquisition of Overture for $1.6 billion, bringing almost all mainstream search technologies (Inkomi. AlaVista. FAST) except Google under its umbrella. Unfortunately, Yahoo! gave up its search technology in 2010 and switched to Microsoft's Bing service. The search technology that Yahoo! previously acquired and the search technology it developed on this basis for many years all died. Overture's PPC advertising platform was integrated and renamed Yahoo! Seurch Marketing.
In 2003, Microsoft MSN began to develop its own search engine technology. Previously, the MSN website used search data from search technology providers such as Inkomi.
year 2004
February
As everyone expected, Yahoo! launched its own search engine after acquiring several major search companies and no longer uses Google data and technology.
August
Google goes public.
November
Microsoft launched its own search engine MSN Search. It no longer uses third-party search services. The period of the three heroes began.
2005
August
Baidu goes public.
year 2006
May
Microsoft launched AdCenter, an advertising system similar to Google Adwords.
September
MSN Search was renamed Live Search. In fact, all MSN Internet brands were changed to Live, and
a lot of promotion was done . However, it did not significantly increase Microsoft's share in the search market, and Google still stands out.
2007
March
Google has also begun to provide a pay-per-conversion advertising format similar to a website alliance. In April, Google
acquired DoubleClick, a traditional online advertising company, and entered a wider field of online advertising.
Year 2009
June
Microsoft Live Search was renamed Bing.
July 29
Microsoft and Yahoo! have reached a historic agreement that Yahoo! will gradually abandon its search technology and
use Bing data. In the past few years, Yahoo! has always been stuck in a difficult situation, the CEO has changed several times, the major shareholder Neijiang, the search market share has been declining. Finally, Yahoo! was completely defeated in the search battlefield by Google, which was trained by himself.
Yahoo! used to be a hero, but the Yahoo! era is officially over.
year 2010
August 25
Yahoo! started using Bing to search data.
year 2011
February 24
Google launched Panda updates aimed at reducing low-quality pages in search results. Until September 2014, Google. launched 27 Panda updates. The Panda update has a profound impact on the SEO industry.
2012
April 24
Google launched Penguin Algorithm to combat cheating links and low-quality links. Later, Google continued to launch new versions of the Penguin algorithm. By October 2014, Penguin 3.0 was launched, and Google has launched 6 Penguin updates.
August
360 launched 360 search, and rapidly increased its domestic search market share with its browser market share.
November
The Baidu webmaster platform launched the external chain query function, which truly makes the Baidu webmaster platform a must-use SEO tool for Chinese webmasters.
year 2013
February 20
Baidu launched the Luluo algorithm to crack down on websites participating in link trading.
May
Baidu launched the pomegranate algorithm to combat low-quality content pages.
June
Yahoo! closed the smash-time AltaVista.
July
Baidu launched Luluo 2.0 to continue to combat spam links, this time focusing on the release of adverts.
August
Google launched the Hummingbird algorithm, which is a rewrite of the entire ranking algorithm.
Year 2014
September
After giving up its search technology for 4 years, Yahoo! announced that even the website directory on which it started its business will be closed at the end of 2014.