10 years of

Looking back at a decade of search that reshaped

the web

This year Google celebrates it’s 10th anniversary

Just how much impact has it had?

The Prequel

A long, long time ago, in an internet generation far, far away from the 21st Century, there were literally thousands of search engines.

A handful, 10 or so of them controlled most of cyberspace.

But then a new presence in the force appeared and started to win the battle for supremacy of the entire galaxy. I mean Internet

Remember these?

TheJurassicPeriod

And thousands more...

Making sense of it all

Some have disappeared

Some have been re-invented• Alexa – web information tool• ASK – an article community site

Some exist somewhat or completely unchanged• IntelSeek, AllTheWeb, Webcrawler

Many others became directories

Making sense of it all

But, why didn’t they work?There were literally thousands of search engines. They all did a terrible job at searchIf you wanted to find something, you had to spend an awful lot of time looking!They each tried different strategies but in the end, they all shared the same common mistakes....

Timeline1960’s “ARPA-net” – first networked internet

1990’s “HTML Web”

1995 Microsoft launches IE3

2004 “Web 2.0

2000 Google reaches 1 billion index – largest search engine

It really didn’t work

1990’s Search EnginesSearch Engines in the 1990’s used library-book style indexing. Search Engines would crawl a page and index it based on content and keywords meta-data. Meta-data tags mushroomed; companies offering meta-data “optimisation” mushroomed too. Sites were loosely categorised by industry, type or location.

Nobody thought anyone would fiddle the tags !?!

Where it all went wrong• Webmasters wrote their own meta

content• Manually submitted and categorised

their own site/sites• Birth of Meta-tag spam• “1990’s” SEO is born

Online Example

What if you wanted something different?

But that was only the start• Searches returned every matching page

from a site• So a search for “Windows Service Pack”

would return thousands of pages of results just from Microsoft.com

People didn’t couldn’t use Search engines like they do now

You couldn’t find what you needed• Webmasters, marketeers, SEO’s, affiliates

soon worked out how to fiddle the system• Search Engines thought that the answer

was amassing the greatest content• Monetisation model: charge for indexing

People didn’t couldn’t use Search engines like they do now

• Banner Marketing was huge: Microsoft had an enourmous solution with bCentral

• SiteRings (like Yahoo!) were all the rage• The traffic sources were mostly direct

instead of search

Internet Marketing: 90’s style

Generating traffic: 1990’s

E-Mail

Banner Ads

Buying Traffic

SEM

People didn’t couldn’t use Search engines like they do now

• 92% of companies in North America used banner ads

• 65% used e-mail• Search Engine Placement was

considered effective less than 5% of the time

Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Generating Traffic: 90’s style

• Development of PageRank • Cut down on spam• Probably the biggest thing marketers dont understand

• Provided better results = happier users• Simplified the User screen – just a search box!• Limited domains to showing just once per

page• Probably one of the major changes• Let smaller sites rank alongside the biggest

• Feeling Lucky

• Meant that sites need community rating• Sites had to have popularity• More important sites got more votes• More links out = less votes per link• The most confused part of internet marketing =

major reduction of spam• Users couldn’t self vote• Probably the main reason for calling SEO snake

oil

• 2 out of 3 visits to websites now come from Google – displacing all other routes

• Ten times as many users in 2010 use Google to go directly to a site instead of using the address bar

• We use Google as a starting place to use the web

How has it changed us?

How many people show people the internet from Google?

Stacking the numbers

34k Searches per second on Google (Feb. 2010)

600 Tweets per second on twitter (Feb. 2010)

2/3 Number of visits on the web that originate at Google

57%

% of Mothers who use search BEFORE making any off -line purchasing decisions (source: Microsoft, 2010; 1000 respondents)

70%

% of Mothers who use search BEFORE making any online purchasing decisions (source: Microsoft, 2010; 1000 respondents)

In Summary

Google found a gap in the market, and exploited it. They found the best way to index websites and the best way to search through them.

Google has made search bigger, faster and easier

It didn’t just become the largest search engine, it became the largest driver of traffic on the planet

Thank you...

I’ve been working in online marketing for 15 years. Its my passion. If you have any questions at all, I’d love to hear them!

http://ie.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid

@PrimaryPosition

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