Search Engines 2002 Year in Review

• Jan. 9, 2003

Well, it’s been quite a year in search engines.  Virtually every engine went through some type of change, whether it be cosmetic, functional or otherwise.

 

Probably the biggest change, which really surprised SEO’s all over the world was the Yahoo! sudden switch to Google for virtually all of its results in October.  They have been partners since 2000 when Yahoo! Dumped Inktomi in favor of Google, but with the October change (read the article here), Yahoo virtually dropped their own paid directory listings to display Google results almost entirely.  Now with the current results, you get an almost line by line match to Google’s results. In the case where there is a directory listing for a site, Yahoo! replaces the Google result with their own directory match.

 

Sites that had paid the $299 submission fee, and had relied heavily on Yahoo! results (and didn’t bother with free submissions to engines like Google) were shocked to wake up in early October to find their sites virtually invisible on the web.  While other sites, those who didn’t want to shell out 300 bucks for the privilege to be in Yahoo’s directory and instead invested more time into the more traditional, free SEO were laughing,  because now good results in Google translated into good results in Yahoo!  We had clients whose visibility jumped by 30 or 40% virtually over night.

 

Skip forward to Christmas time, and Yahoo! makes another surprising move by buying itself an early Christmas present.  They purchased Inktomi search, their former partner, for $235 Million. (See our article about this here).  Implications of this purchase are far reaching and will definitely change the way SEO’s do their jobs in the coming months.

 

Speaking of Google, they went through a major algorithm update in September.  They are working towards making their page rank more accurate, in order to give their users what they consider to be the most relevant results for their particular search.

 

In fact, they banned a company that openly advertised the sale of Page Rank™.  After all, this type of website promotion goes against what Google promotes – relevant accurate results.  This company was banned for some time, and then reinstated late in the year (after they threatened a lawsuit) but they lost their Page Rank™.  At the time of this writing the company was going back to court to sue Google to get their Page Rank™ restored.

 

Still on the Google front, AOL also adopted Google as their primary search results supplier back in July.  Let’s stop to consider this. AOL Yahoo! and Google now show the same results.  AOL, Yahoo! and Google represent about 85% of the web as far as search traffic goes. So in essence, Google supplies their results to 85% of the searchers out there.  And you thought traditional SEO was dead.

 

Some search engines also went through some major restructuring.  Altavista and Hotbot both got major facelifts.  They reduced or eliminated banner ads and began to focus more on search.  Altavista played with their ranking algorithm while Hotbot decided that displaying large numbers of results from different engines was the way to go (By the way, Hotbot also has a Google section).

 

There also were a few other changes as well, Looksmart changed their revenue model to PPC which annoyed (to put it lightly) many of their customers.  Overture got a bigger chunk of the PPC market, by renewing existing deals and creating new ones.  They also introduced new technology which helps their customers, while increasing their revenue.

 

There were also some new players in the game.  Myway.com was launched by the former owners of Iwon.com.  I believe it is a good example of what is to come in the search portal business (the model which Google has used from day one) a plain, fast, relevant search service.  No advertising, just search, news, and other links.

 

So it was an exciting year, as far as search services go, and 2003 is already shaping up to be a very interesting one, with the Yahoo! Inktomi purchase.  It is anyone’s guess as to what will happen in the coming months.

 

Rob Sullivan

rob@searchengineposition.com