A Brief History Of The Search Engine

If you have ever wondered how search engines came to be, or how they evolved over the years then this article is for you.

Search marketing is the process of generating traffic and gaining visibility from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo through paid and unpaid strategies. This includes generating traffic through organic or free listings as well as buying traffic through paid search listings on ad networks like Google AdWords.

This process was originally called “search engine marketing,” the shorter phrase “search marketing” is now often used as a term to cover search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) which is used to describe paid search activities.

Before we dive into how you can use search marketing for your business I want to share a little bit of search engine history with you so you can get a better understanding of how they work.  

History Of The Search Engine

Not too long ago, if a person needed information they were forced to go to the local library and spend hours digging through shelves of books. Nowadays finding information is easier than ever before and we have search engines to thank for that. Now when someone needs information all they have to do is type in a query online and a list of options appear for them to explore.

In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montreal. The search engine was called Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. FTPs (short for File Transfer Protocol) are used to transfer data from one computer to another over the internet, or through a network that supports TCP/IP protocol.

In its early days, Archie contacted a list of FTP archives approximately once a month with a request for a listing. Once Archie received a listing it was stored in local files and could only be searched using a UNIX grep command.

Search Engine Today

Today, search engines index much faster and match a user’s keyword query with a list of potential websites that might have the information the users are looking for instantly, which makes them a very powerful tool for online marketers.

The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther they the second page the search engine provides. As marketers, it is important to constantly find and use new methods of search engine optimization in order to be ranked high by the search engines. Those are the types of topics we will be coving in upcoming issues of this newsletter.

Search marketing can be very confusing especially when you are just getting started. People who say that they understand it usually have a general idea of what is going on, but often can’t give you any real details about it. As you learn the ropes you will hear a lot of buzz words to get you excited about something that you really don’t understand.

So how do you know what is right and what isn’t? The answer to these questions is a lot of research, time, and testing. It isn’t something that you can understand in one day. Getting to the top of the search engine results can be very beneficial and the best way to do that is to make sure that you understand how to market your business, and how search engine marketing can play a role.

Make sure you look for your next issue soon. We will be talking about basic search engine optimization tactics.