10 years of google

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?
The
Jurassic
Period

And thousands more...

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 search
If 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....
Making sense of it all

Timeline
1960’s “ARPA-net” – first networked internet
1990’s “HTML Web”
2004 “Web 2.0
1995 Microsoft launches IE3
2000 Google reaches 1 billion index – largest search engine

1990’s Search Engines
Search 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.
It really didn’t work

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
Nobody thought anyone would fiddle the tags !?!
Online
Example

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
What if you wanted something different?

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

Internet Marketing: 90’s style
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

Generating traffic: 1990’s

Generating Traffic:90’s style
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

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 searchbox!
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

How has it changed us?
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 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!
@PrimaryPosition
Blog
info@primaryposition.com
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid
PrimaryPosition.com

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10 years of google

by PrimaryPosition.com on Oct 17, 2010

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10 years of google — Presentation Transcript