History of search engines in the internet
A spam message on Usenet that was posted on July 26, 1997 contained the word, “search engine optimization” and this is considered to be the earliest known use of the phrase.
Optimization of the sites for search engines, for making the sites rank high and instantly visible in the search engine results began in the mid 1990’s.
The process encompasses downloading of a page by a search engine spider, storing of the same on the server of the specific search engine and extracting the essential information on the page by an indexer. The essential information on the page comprises the words it contains, frequency of specific words and the entire set of links on the page
Search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation causes by irrelevant use of keywords by webmasters for high ranking.
A search engine, “backrub”, created by Stanford University graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin relied on a mathematical ranking algorithm.
They founded Google in the year 1998.
The algorithm, PageRank enables the net surfer to reach the page abound with essential information and to follow the links to obtain more information.
Link building tools and schemes were innovated by many webmasters to tamper with the Inktomi search engine to gain PageRank. Link spamming resulted from the link schemes or link farms. A gamut of undisclosed factors of ranking algorithms is devised to mitigate link schemes’ impact.
Google declares the use of more than 200 signals for ranking sites. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search keep the algorithms used for ranking websites, guarded.
