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Head of SEO
SEO
Search engines have revolutionised the way we discover and interact with information. Today, we rely on the power of search to answer questions, guide our purchases, and help us to connect with the world. For many of us, our search engine of choice is Google. Since its creation in 1995, Google has grown to monopolise the search engine landscape.
As detailed in a Statista study from February 2024, Google has over 80% of the global market share for search engines, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down any time soon. But Google’s creation is only a small part of a larger search engine origin story. Several search engines existed before Google, and they had just as much of an impact on the internet.
But what were they, and how did they lay the groundwork for how we navigate the internet today? In this blog, I look at what search engines came before Google, the ways search engines have evolved since then, and certain SEO challenges specialists faced as part of the evolution of organic search.
As the number of people accessing the internet increased throughout the 1980s, so did the importance of structure and accessibility. Archie emerged in 1990 as the first search engine to solve the data scatter problem and organise information on the rapidly expanding World Wide Web.
Invented by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Archie combined a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher. It helped users retrieve file names that matched their queries by searching through a list of anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites and archives. Users were then able to access the file they were searching for by downloading it to their machine.
Three years after Archie’s creation, several thousand individuals were using Archie worldwide, conducting up to 50,000 searches a day. However, the development of new versions of Archie ended in 1996, and the first search engine, Archie, fell into obscurity.
Amazingly, though, Archie has not been lost in the annals of time. An Archie legacy server was held at the University of Warsaw in Poland, and through assistance from The Serial Port (a website-based computer museum), Archie became accessible once more in 2024.
So, as search engine complexity continued to grow throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, each search engine began to have its own unique features and approaches to indexing the web, just as Archie had all those years ago.
WebCrawler was developed in 1994 and was the first search engine to provide full-text search. This meant that WebCrawler could index and retrieve the entire content of web pages, marking a significant shift in how users interacted with the web. As of 2024, users can still use WebCrawler to carry out searches.
Lycos is a search engine and web directory that was founded in 1994. It is the first search engine to go public on the stock market. Like Google, Lycos has offered email services, online social platforms, and even wearable technology. Remarkably, as with Webcrawler, Lycos is still in operation today.
Infoseek, founded in 1995, was the first search engine to allow real-time submissions to its index. This changed the game for website owners, who could now make their content quickly discoverable in search engine results. Infoseek ceased operations after being purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 1999.
AltaVista was launched around the same time, in December 1995. It offered natural language searches and indexed huge amounts of web content. AltaVista was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003 and continued to influence the organic search landscape until its demise in 2013.
As search engines rose in prominence, website owners soon realised how important it was to rank highly on a search engine’s results page (SERP), giving rise to the practice known as search engine optimisation (SEO), a term first used in 1995. At this time, SEO practices were primitive. Search engine algorithms were not developed enough to spot methods that displayed irrelevant or low-quality content, that marketing professionals now consider (to coin an SEO term) “black hat,” including:
But as search engines evolved, they became much better at detecting these poor practices and changed the way they indexed sites. Instead of just assessing a page’s content, algorithms began considering the number of links pointing to a site and the relevance of the anchor text. This change aimed to improve the accuracy with which the authority and relevance of a site could be measured.
By 1998, the search engine landscape was crowded and competitive, but a new player was about to emerge and change everything: Google. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google was originally called Backrub, a nod to its approach to ranking pages based on “backlinks.”
Two years after developing Backrub, the pair wanted to change the name of their search engine to something that better reflected the vast amount of data it handled. The term “Googolplex” was suggested during a brainstorming session, which is a number equal to 10 to the power of 100. From this suggestion came the name “Googol” and then, because of a typo when searching availability on the domain name registry, “Google” came to be.
To support Google, Page and Brin developed PageRank, an algorithm that assessed the number of links to a site and the credibility of the sites being linked to. PageRank was designed to “understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”
As Google continued to refine its algorithms and expand its service offerings, its position as the go-to global search engine was solidified. Today, as noted by SEMrush, Google processes close to six million searches each minute, an astounding figure given how many search engines came before it.
From the humble beginnings of Archie to the sophistication of Google, search engines have shaped how we access and process information. As search behaviour evolves, search engines will undoubtedly continue delivering the most relevant and useful information to users in the most suitable ways possible.
In the Future of SEO report, we address key challenges in the evolving organic search landscape and provide actionable guidance on how to conquer these issues.
From the rise of generative AI to user journeys becoming more fragmented, we look at ways marketers can develop future-proofed solutions to enhance their global search strategy, allowing marketers to achieve sustainable SEO success.
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