Search Engines History

SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search-engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called connected search-words, so a page with many not the same words matched more searches, and a webpage contains a dictionary-type listing would match closely all searches, limited only by unique names. The search-engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had spidered. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, so stock search engines began to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a friction between search engine and webmaster that continues to this day.

At first search-engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided that information such as category and product meta tags. Meta-tags provided that a guide to each page's content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta-tags, causing their sides to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines abandoned their consideration of meta-tags and instead developed more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that elevated a limited number of words (anti-dictionary) and was more diverse, including:

• Text within the title tag

• Domain name

• URL directories and file names

• HTML tags: headings, bold and emphasized text

• product density

• product close proximity

• Alt attributes for images

• Text within NOFRAMES tags

But, relying so extensively on factors that were still within the webmasters' restricted control, search-engines continued to hurt from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search-engines had to adapt to ensure their SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless pages filled with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters, using a bait-and-switch lure to display unrelated webpages. This led to the rise of a new kind of search engine.