2000
- The web is littered with search engines and directories: GoTo, MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, FAST, Lycos, iWon, Looksmart, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, and others. Many were powered by other search engines, either for primary, secondary, or all results. It was so difficult to figure out who powered whom that Bruce Clay made his famous Search Engine Relationship Chart
- Google claims largest web index: 560 million fully indexed web pages + 500 million partially indexed web pages = 1 billion+ web pages
- Yahoo's search results get powered by Google
- Search engines regularly update the number of documents they have indexed; it is a claim to fame that matters in these days
- Search happens in search engines and in directories. The two are equally important at this time. Getting listed in directories is a big deal in SEO.
- Hidden content, doorway & gateway pages
- Google Adwords launches
- Dodgeball is founded, the first location-based social network service
2001
- Excite effectively dies
- Yahoo's price for submission goes up from the $199 one-time fee to a $299/year listing
- GoTo becomes Overture
- InfoSeek is shut down by owner Disney
2002
- Yahoo buys Inktomi (the search tech that powers HotBot)
- Google News
- Google Froogle
- Friendster, one of the first online social networking sites as we know them now, goes live
2003
- Overture buys AltaVista, to be left to die further when it's bought by Yahoo later on
- Yahoo buys HotBot, leaves it to die
- Yahoo buys AllTheWeb, leaves it to die
- Yahoo buys Overture
- Google buys the Hilltop algorithm patent, a patent which describes sorting documents by how authoritative they are – and that based on a match between the query and the anchor texts from other expert pages to the document displayed
- Taher Haveliwala, author of the Topic-Sensitive PageRank paper, employed by Google
- Google's "Florida" update sees tons of affiliate sites, cookie-cutter sites & link networks dropped from the first pages. Keyword-stuffing & anchor-stuffing
- Google introduces keyword stemming
- Social networking site MySpace goes live
- Social bookmarking site del.icio.us goes live
- Reciprocal linking is the name of the game
- Googe launches Adsense
- WordPress, a free blogging script, is released
- Google buys Blogger
2004
- Google launches Orkut, a social networking site, after it couldn't buy Friendster. The network was invitation only…
- Social image/photo site Flickr goes live
- Social "news" site Digg.com goes live
- Google's "Sandbox" effect. Some new sites don't seem to be able to rank at all for months on end.
- TheFacebook goes live, in 2005 to become Facebook
- Google IPO of $1.67 billion
- Firefox 1.0 web browser launched
- Google introduces Personalized Search for users who are logged in
- Google's index contains 8 billion pages
2005
- Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data patent (Google) approved
- Google employee Matt Cutts starts blogging, becoming for many years the SEO <> Google liason
- Video sharing web site YouTube goes live. Here's the first video uploaded.
- Google buys Urchin, relaunches it a few months later as Google Analtyics, offering enterprise strength web analytics … for free
- Google buys Dodgeball
2006
- Google "Big Daddy" update. Lots of sites get dropped from the main index and are moved to supplemental results due to very low trust in their inbound and outbound links. Many link directories and directory-supported web sites suffer
- Twitter goes live with this first status update
- Facebook opens to everyone with an email address
- Google buys YouTube
- After having signed a deal agreeing, in principle to censorship, Google China opens
2007
- Apple unveils the iPhone and changes mobile browsing
- Online social network traffic overtakes web mail in the UK
- AOL stops development of the Netscape browser
- Google gets more than 50% of USA's search traffic
- Google introduces Universal Search
- Social marketing news sharing site Sphinn launched
- Social networking sites start to become a part of SEO
- Tumblr goes live
2008
- Google launches its web browser, Google Chrome, with the publication of a comic
- Microsoft launches its partly new, partly rebranded search engine Bing
- Google buys DoubleClick
2009
- Google "Vince" update factors in trust for some queries. The result is a big push for big brands.
- Google Caffeine testing begins. It's a new infrastructure for the data that underlies a web index. The index will live entirely in memory. Supplemental index (and thus supplemental results) no longer exist.
- Google shows personalized to all users, logged in or not
- Yahoo signs 10 year deal with Microsoft to have its search results powered by Bing
- Google ads tweets to real-time search
- Google closes Dodgeball
2010
- Google Caffeine goes officially live
- Facebook overtakes Google in traffic in the USA
- Sphinn eliminates voting
- Yahoo kills its own search technology, gets 100% powered by Microsoft's Bing
- Ask Jeeves kills its own search technology
- Google launches Instant Search
- Google China effectively closes as, after being hacked, Google refuses to continue to censor its Chinese search results
- Google Boutiques
Looking Back
- It's almost impressive how Google dropped the ball twice on social: not able to buy Friendster they launch Orkut (Facebook before Facebook) and fumble it… then they buy Dodgeball (Twitter before Twitter) and fumble that. They're never going to recover from either.
- I remember some of this stuff as if it was yesterday … Hm…. #alarming #memory #illusion
- Time flies
- Stripping away shiny objects (preview, autocomplete, etc.) search has changed remarkably … little
What are some of you key memories or events?