In 1998, who knew that two doctoral students at Stanford University would change the world?<\/p>\n
Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google while they were at Stanford. Most point to their work as the beginning of search engine history.<\/p>\n
They played a huge role in the evolution of search engines, but the history of search engines goes back much further.<\/p>\n
Keep reading to find out more about the history of search engines and where the industry is heading in the future.<\/p>\n
Some people say the history of search engines began in the 1940s. Others cite 1993 as the beginning of search engine history.<\/p>\n
In both cases, projects tried to make sense of the growing number of internet connections and information.<\/p>\n
Search engines as we know them today began in 1993. Another set of students at Stanford looked to catalog the growing amount of web pages. That project became Excite.com.<\/p>\n
In 1994, Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo launched Yahoo! This became the first big search engine.<\/p>\n
Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AltaVista, and InfoSeek were other popular search engines in the mid-late 1990s. <\/p>\n
What did Sergey Brin and Larry Page do that was so special? They brought order to search results.<\/p>\n
They wrote a research paper that explained how to prioritize search results for a better user experience. PageRank is the method of using backlinks to determine the quality of a webpage.<\/p>\n
The assumption is that if another website linked to your website, it\u2019s a vote of confidence in your content.<\/p>\n
The more votes a page has, the higher the quality. The higher the quality, the higher the position in search results.<\/p>\n
That paper plays a huge role in the history of SEO because search results were no longer random. Webmasters could work to deliver backlinks and get sites to appear higher in search results.<\/p>\n
SEO professionals worked to stuff keywords and buy spammy backlinks to manipulate search results. This worked for a while.<\/p>\n
That led to a poor user experience. Google changed its algorithm in 2011 with the Panda Update. This was to improve the standing of high-quality sites and punish low-quality sites.<\/p>\n
It effectively stopped keyword stuffing. The algorithm now knows how to read internal and external links to understand the context of a website. <\/p>\n