2000

2000: Bush vs Gore, Yahoo, Memento, PS2, Survivor, NY Times

  • 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

2001: WTC, Windows XP, Harry Potter, HP Pocket PC, Friends, BBC News

  • 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

2002: Homeland Security, Lord of the Rings, Heinz, CSI, Friendster

  • 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

2003: Raq war, Delicious, Lord of the Rings, iTunes, Mythbusters, MySpace

  • 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

2004: Abu Ghraib, Shrek 2, Motorola Razor, Lost

  • 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

2005: Hurricane Katrina, Harry Potter, iPod, Grey's Anatomy

  • 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

2006: Steve Irwin, Where the hell is Matt, Pirates of the Carribean, Wii, Hannah Montana, Twitter

  • 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

2007: subprime economic crisis, Sphinn, Pirates of the Carribean, iPhone, Private Practice, tumblr

2008

2008: Obama, Dark Knight, Google Chrome, Olympic Games China, Breaking Bad, Bing

  • 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

2009: Michael Jackson, Avatar, Windows 7, Vampire Diaries

  • 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

2010: WikiLeaks, Olympic Games Canada, Toy Story 3, iPad, Shit my dad says, blekko

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?

About the Author: Ruud Hein

I love helping to make web sites make it. From the ground up if needed. CSS challenges, server-side scripting, user and device friendly JavaScript tricks search engines have no problems with. Tracking how the sites perform and then figuring out how to make that performance and the tracking better. I'm passionate about information. No matter how often I trim my feeds in my feed readers (yes, I use more than one), I always have a couple of hundred in there covering topics ranging from design to usability, from SEO to SEM, from life hacks to productivity blogs, from.... Well, you get the idea, I guess. Knowledge and information management is close to my heart. Has to be with the amount of information I track. My "trusted system" is usually in flux but always at hand and fully searchable. My paid passion job at Search Engine People sees me applying my passions and knowledge to a wide array of problems, ones I usually experience as challenges. It's good to have you here: pleased to meet you!