From the beginning man has constantly been searching for something, whether it was cavemen searching for food and shelter, philosophers searching for the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything (The answer is 42 by the way) or teenagers searching for their friends and favorite music. Searching has always been part of our lives.
Searching has evolved over the years with mankind’s constant demand for wanting information faster. Many of us can remember the days when a phone book and rotary phone was the best way to find people and information. In today’s world, we have access to the Internet and search engines, which allow us to get to the information we need from anywhere in the world, and all of this can be done with a simple click of a button or a swipe of a finger.
In the last 20 years, online searching has grown rapidly, first with the introduction of the World Wide Web back in 1991, and then with the development of search engines, web crawlers and page rankings. Since then, search engines have constantly evolved as new standards were set by the rapidly growing web world.
In 1997, the words “search engine optimization” were first used by John Audette and Bruce Clay, and soon after SEO became a widely used term. In 1998, Google entered the search engine arena and soon took the lead in search engine market share, becoming the industry leader in search.
The 2001 Exodus was a huge kick in the shorts for many, as users abandoned older search engines like HotBot, AltaVista and Excite. Many users had moved their interest towards the new kid on the block, and so began “The Reign of Google.”
“Many SEO’s have sleepless nights as we realize it is Google or bust”. – Brett Tabke, Founder of WebmasterWorld
In 2009, Microsoft gathered all that it had learned from its previous search engines (MSN Search, live Search, Windows live Search) and wrapped it all into what they now call Bing. About a year later, Yahoo! jumps on board with Microsoft and begins using the Bing search technology as well.
Now to the present …
We have already seen some big changes in 2011, and we‘re only 3 months in. Facebook received a patent for curated search, which will involve ranking searches according to a link’s popularity. Google released the Farmer/Panda update, which devalues content farms like ezinearticles.com and others. Plus, Google introduced the +1 button with hopes of kicking their social search into high gear.
So much has happened already this year but I am sure there’s plenty more to come. Where do you see search engines and SEO heading in the next year, or even five years?
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The History of Search
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sweet infographic that must have taken forever to create!
Yes, it did take some time to gather the information, but it was a fun process and great learning experience.
Great work.
Thank you!
Great informative article about the history of search five star work.Must read
Beautiful piece of work, guys. I love it. If this were a wallpaper, I would plaster it all over my office.
Awesome job, James. The idea spawned about a year ago, I think. Great to see it come together. Fascinating story about search, too.
Thanks Dan, and yes it has been in the works for a while now. I’m glad we could finally put things together and get it out there.
Nice work James! That’s the best history of search infographic I have seen.
Absolutely spectacular, James. Best infographic I’ve ever seen. This one makes a very elite group of infographics I keep around as teaching examples. A+
Great infographic. Well done. I did not realize Alexa’s been around since 1996. While they’re not exactly thriving, they still have more traction than most of their mid ’90s counterparts. I was also surprised that SEOMoz has only been around since 2004. Seems like those dudes have been around forever.
I was a little disappointed to not see Infoseek on here at all. I used to love that search engine. In 1998, Infoseek indexed pages so fast, it was incredible. You could submit a page from your site and in 5 minutes you could search and it’s showing up. Then you could tweak your meta tags or stuff a few more keywords in alt or comments, or white text at the bottom of the page and resubmit to see if it improved in the rankings. AltaVista was similar, but took a few days to show up. The others took a week or two to index new pages.
James, well done. You know what they say, an idea is worthless without execution. Congratulations on all of your hard work with this infographic. You took an over-talked idea, and turned it into reality.
I do have one small beef- I think some of your information is incorrect. It has always been my understanding that Al Gore created the internet.
WOW that took alot of time… James nice work
Fantastic Work!! I have learnt something here.
James you are a star
James,
Where is the birth of SEO.com in this timeline? How did that get left out? J.K. Great job with the timeline.
Dustin
Congratulations! this is fantastic work. That’s going straight to my favorites
Very nice, but one nit to pick: I think that when you write “Internet” on the first couple of entries you really mean “World Wide Web”. Archie was an Internet search engine, just one that indexed files over FTP instead of HTTP. Tim Berners-Lee invented the URI, HTTP and HTML, which lead (among other factors) to the explosion of the consumer Internet in the late 1990s, but to call 1991 “the birth of the Internet” is really misleading. The term Internet dates back to at least then 1970s with the standardization of the TCP/IP protocol which is the foundation for HTTP but also FTP, NNTP, SMTP, BitTorrent, etc. The Internet existed before (and will probably exist after) the Web.
WOW! This is one of the best infographics I think I have ever seen. Thanks for sharing this!
Just great great info. Brought back alot of memories because I remember owning a computer in college when the internet wasnt live yet. We are fortunate to live at such critical time period.
Very Nice info.
One more thing that I want to ask” Is bing powered by Google”
Because the result for most of the queries is same in both search engines.
Wow! That is really cool! Very informative and it catches the eye. Something that could have easily started out as a side project or something and turned into a very nice graphic.
Wow very detailed! Completely done. Good to share this facts. Thank you.
Very Nice and detailed information. Fantastic Work!! I have learnt something new here
10x for good post James. have entered the wonderful “seo world” and need help? You opened the right website. Here you can find my seo recommendations you need.
Great info and very long infographic, we are thinking doing a graphic about the panda update. thanks for the post.
what happened to goto.com / overture?
Congratulations! this is fantastic work. Saved straight to my favorites
Awesome infographic, thank you.
An Informative, colourful, and engaging infographic… thanks
Andy