The Start of Search Engines
There is a reason that search engines have become synonymous with the World Wide Web, and that is because they were popularized by the Web.
Search engines are so powerful and influential that they have been in use for decades – they actually predate the Web itself, with the user-searches Whois and Knowbot Information Service dating back to the 1980s. The World Wide Web was indexed entirely by hand until the idea to implement search engines came about in 1993. W3Catalog and Aliweb became the world’s first web search engines that year. Their creation led to the creation of several other search engines throughout the 90s, with each one being more refined than its predecessors. Notable ones included Magellan, Infoseek, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves. However, not long after Google’s inception in 1998, it completely changed the game. It became an innovator due to several distinct features, most notably its minimal design interface, its use of the PageRank algorithm [the algorithm counts the number and quality of links to a page in order to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is – more important websites receive more links from other sites], and their practice of selling search terms.
Search Engines Today – Utilizing the SEO Marketing Agency
Google paved the way for other search engines such as Bing to come to fruition, and has also boosted the popularity of search engines in general. Nowadays, when people think of the Internet, Google/other search engines are the first things to come to mind. Search engines are what start 93% of online experiences, according to a journal study done in 2012. With this, and the fact that 12 billion web searches are done per month collectively in the United States, more and more companies have taken to the internet to conduct their advertising in order to get more exposure. One of the forms of advertising that is becoming more and more prevalent is SEO marketing, or search engine optimization marketing. First mad popular by the practices of Google, SEO is a form of advertising in which an SEO marketing agency will sell businesses and corporations search terms. The marketing agency figures out which search terms will help steer the average web user in the direction of their client company. The use of SEO tools has proven to be very successful, drawing a 14.6% close rate, versus the 1.7% close rate drawn by outbound leads (print advertising, direct mail, etc), according to Search Engine Journal.