The first true search facility was created in 1990 by a university student called Alan Emtage.  He called it Archie!  The following year an alternaive to Archie called Gopher was created and it was this that began to shape the concept of search engines.

In 1993 the World Wide Web Wanderer was created which contained the first robot and one year later seach engines as we know them today were created.   Lycos, Galaxy and Yahoo were ‘born’.

1994 saw the first concept of SEO being experimented with.  The early emphasis was only submission processes but very quickly the first automated submission software package was released and just as quickly the term spam was heralded

Soon the cat and mouse game between optimisers and search engines began.  Many optimisers found new ranking techniques and as a result of this struggle search engines had to revise and improve their ranking algorithms in response.

Even in the early 90’s search engines recognised that SEO was around for good and decided that they had to accept and embrace the industy if they were going to maintain useful indexes.  This soon led to many ethical SEO companies to becoming partner sites.

The technology of SEO

The very first commercial search engines such as Yahoo and Galaxy were referred to as directories.  What this meant is that the actual technology of the sites listed in their index were not what mattered, what mattered instead was the aesthetic and quality of the site.  But this changed with the introduction of the early major ‘spider based search properties’ contained within Lycos, Alta Vista and Inktomi.  From then on their ability to investigate websites became of major importance.

Spidersm, or robots, consist of pieces of software that are used by search engines to investigate the content of a website, once done they submit their findings to the search engine database.  Their searches are then ranked according to algorithms, whose purpose is to attach certain priorities to the database.  This determines the order that the website will be placed in the search engine result page.

The ethics of SEO

Today search engines insist on users following a code of ethics.  The result of infringement can be drastic to business to say the least.  The reason behind this is that they need to get an accurate picture of what is happening on the web.  The more accurate a search engines index, the higher the popularity of the search engine amongst users which results in more users and more revenue.

Search engines want to index as much of the world wide web as they possibly can, but they also want their index to be true and accurate, and this has resulted in a trade off.  The result is that it has created spam.  Spam is considered those unethical practices used by unethical webmasters to boost their rankings in an artificial way.  This dilutes the quality of search results which means larger indexes which are much less accurate.  This can result in a fall off of users and loss of revenue.

Get Involved