Webmasters today spend quite some time optimizing their

websites for search engines. Books have been written about

search engine optimization and some sort of industry has

developed to offer search engine optimization services to

potential clients. But where did this all start? How did we end

up with the SEO world we live in today (from a webmaster

standpoint seen)?

A guy named Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill,

developed the first search engine for the Internet in 1990. This

search engine was called "Archie" and was designed to archive

documents available on the Internet at that time. About a year

later, Gopher, an alternative search engine to Archie, was

developed at the University of Minnesota. These two kinda

search engines triggered the birth of what we use as search

engines today.

In 1993, Matthew Gray developed very first search engine robot

• the World Wide Web Wanderer. However, it took until 1994 that

search engines as we know them today were born. Lycos, Yahoo!

And Galaxy were started and as you probably - two of those are

still around today (2005).

In 1994 some companies started experimenting with the concept

of search engine optimization. The emphasis was put solely on

the submission process at that time. Within 12 months, the

first automated submission software packages were released. Of

course it did not take long until the concept of spamming

search engines was 'invented'. Some webmasters quickly realized

that they could swamp and manipulate search results pages by

over-submission of their sites. However - the search engines

soon fought back and changed things to prevent this from

happen.

Soon, search engine optimizers and the search engines started

playing some sort of a "cat and mouse" game. Once a way to

manipulate a search engine was discovered by the SE-optimizers

they took advantage of this. The search engines subsequently

revised and enhanced their ranking algorithms to respond to

these strategies. It was clear very soon that mainly a small

group of webmasters was abusing the search engine algorithms to

gain advantage over the competition. Black Hat search engine

optimization was born. The unethical way of manipulating search

engine resulted in faster responses from search engines. Search

engines are trying to keep the search results clean of SPAM to

provide the best service to customers.

The search engine industry quickly realized that SEO (Search

Engine Optimization) as an industry would not go away, and in

order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least

accept the industry. Search engines now partially work with the

SEO industry but are still very eager to sort out SPAMMERS that

are trying to manipulate the results.

When Google.com started to be the search engine of choice for

more than 50% of the Internet users it was highly visible to

anyone in the industry that search engine spamming had reached

a new dimension. Google.com was so much more important to the

success of a website that many webmasters solely concentrated

on optimizing their sites for Google only as the payoff was

worth the efforts. Again - Black Hat SEO took place, pushing

down the honest webmaster and their sites in search results

delivered. Google started fighting back. Several major updates

to Google's algorithms forced all webmaster to adapt to new

strategies. Black Hat SE-optimizers but suddenly saw something

different happening. Instead of just being pushed down in the

search results their websites were suddenly completely removed

from the search index.

And then there was something called the "Google Sandbox" to

show up in discussions. Websites either disappeared into the

sandbox or new websites never made it into the index and were

considered in the Google Sandbox. The sandbox seemed to be the

place where Google would 'park' websites either considered

SPAMMY or not to be conform with Google's policies (duplicate

websites under different domain names, etc.). The Google

Sandbox so far has not been confirmed or denied by Google and

many webmasters consider it to be myth.

In late 2004 Google announced to have 8 billion pages/sites in

the search index. The gap between Google and the next two

competitors (MSN and Yahoo!) seemed to grow. However - in 2005

MSN as well as Yahoo! Started fighting back putting life back

into the search engine war. MSN and Yahoo seemed to gain ground

in delivering better and cleaner results compared to Google. In

July of 2005 Yahoo! Announced to have over 20 billion

pages/sites in the search index - leaving Google far behind. No

one search engine has won the war yet. The three major search

engines however are eagerly fighting for market share and one

mistake could change the fortune of a search engine. It will be

a rocky ride - but worth watching from the sidelines.