A Brief History of Search Engines

One of the most used types of WebPages on the internet is one that we take for granted. The search engine is such an important part of our web browsing experience that we sometimes forget how useful it really is.

A search engine allows us to categorize and make sense of the information that is available online. If there was no search engine you would have to know the exact web address of any site you wanted to visit. This would make finding new information very hard.

Lucky for us the search engine was invented. The first search engines began being created in 1993. There were several early pioneers in search engines that we owe a lot of the credit to. These include Martijn Kojer and Matthew Grey. The first commercial search engine program was called ALIWEB. It allowed users to submit their pages and crawled pages looking for meta information. This worked out well because it did not take up an extraordinarily large amount of bandwidth.

Later in the same year Excite was created. This was one of the first search engines that tried to make sense of the data and create a web directory. This idea would be put into place more commercially by Yahoo a couple of years later. In the mid 1990s there were hundreds of search engines, but the two big players were Yahoo and Lycos.

In 1996 Google was invented. It didn’t make a splash at first, but over time they have included features in their search engine that separated them from the pack. Their intuitive search features helped eliminate spam in the search results and their clean webpage was an oasis in an overcrowded internet. By the year 2001, Google was head and shoulders above the crowd, and at least for now they retain their crown as king of the search engine wars.

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Use of HTML for Keyword Placement

Art.sy Logo / 2010 / SML
Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via Flickr

Proper use of HTML is essential not only for the development of webpages and blogs, but also to convince search engines that the site has relevant information and is worthy of being ranked. One of the least used areas of the page for search engine optimization is the webpage title.

Search engines don’t care about how clever your title is, or how you may have used big words to impress your audience. What these search engines do care about is locating keywords. It is suspected that Google’s search engines don’t look past the first 120 characters of any title, and it is believed that the use of punctuation in your title will count as some of those first 120 characters. Like looking for Los Angeles apartments, the search engine crawlers don’t want to spend much effort looking for your keywords. Therefore, it is very important to choose your title so that Google will take those keywords into consideration when ranking your site.

HTML is invisible to the readers, but the author of the site needs to ensure that the site’s title and description adequately contain the keywords within the first 120 characters. Don’t stuff your title or description; the search engine only needs to find it once and it doesn’t care how many times you use it, but your readers might!

Make your title and description interesting and relevant to your site. It should be a kind of teaser, enticing people to click on the link to go to your site. This is the first exposure a reader will have to your site and if you want to gain organic traffic then you need to give them a reason to click on your link.

Understanding the basic use of HTML to properly place your keywords in the site’s title and description is imperative to ranking well with the search engines.

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The Internet is Waiting for Your Questions – But Should You Really Ask?

LeapFish Search Engine Screenshot
Image via Wikipedia

When someone goes looking for information, one of the main places they search is on the Internet. That makes sense, because the Internet is just waiting for your questions. There’s so much information available out there that you’re almost guaranteed to find something that will speak to the concerns you have. one thing you have to be careful of is what sites you find the information on. If you find them on sites that you aren’t familiar with or that don’t have a good reputation for being accurate, you might not get results that are truthful.

A lot of people find this kind of problem with medical advice. They have some symptoms that they aren’t sure about the seriousness of, so they go ahead and put those symptoms into the search engine. Then, they spend the rest of the day terrified because they think that they’re dying. For example, typing ‘chest pain’ into a search engine will return a lot of alarming statistics regarding heart attacks and other heart-related problems. What those first few search engine results probably won’t tell you is that there are more than 30 different causes for chest pain, and almost all of them are benign. That doesn’t mean the symptom should be ignored, especially if it’s new, but searching for it online and then panicking might not be the best choice.

Pulled muscles, pluracy, gas pains, indigestion, sitting in one spot for too long, being tense and nervous, depression, anxiety, and all sorts of other things can cause chest pains. Don’t believe everything you read. The Internet can be great for all kinds of uses, but it’s better to leave medical questions to your doctor. It’s safer, and it will spare you a lot of anxiety and misunderstandings.

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Using the Internet to Find Information

When you’re looking for great information, one of the ways you can find it is through the Internet. In the past, people had to look things up at the library or find other ways to get information that they wanted. Now they can simply go online and almost everything that they want to know is right there at their fingertips. If you want to find the right information quickly, though, and locate something that you can trust, you have to start learning how to search. A lot of people don’t know the way to do an effective online search.

They string together a few common words and hope that they find what they’re looking for. More often than not, though, they don’t get what they were really after. They assume that the information isn’t out there, but it’s entirely possible that they weren’t looking in the correct way for the right thing. You can learn not to be that person by searching for long-tail keywords. That way, you get more information about the specific thing you’re hunting, instead of getting a lot of things that are vaguely related or only answer part of your question.

If you search the right way, you won’t spend a lot of time going through pages of search results in the hope that you will eventually discover the information that you were looking for. Instead, you’ll find what you want without much hassle, which will mean that it’ll take less time for you to get your answers and you can move on to other things that you want to know and discover. When you search that way, life is easier and the Internet offers you the kinds of things that you really want to learn.

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Utilizing the Internet for Your Business

Running your own business has become easier to do because of the internet. The internet makes it possible to connect with consumers that would not know your business even exists. You can market your products or services to everyone in the world, rather than just locally. This makes your potential for profit dramatically increase. You are not limited by physical distance. You can advertise, sell and make money by using the internet to your advantage.

The first step in using the internet to your advantage is by creating a website. Many websites will let you create a free website. There are usually limits in place on bandwidth activity and you might have unwanted ads placed on your site. If you want to create a business website, you need to consider paying for one. This way, you can have the domain name of your choice and place your own ads. It also looks more professional to have your own site instead of a free site.

Professional website designers are an option, as well. If you do not know much about creating a website, you can hire a designer to do it for you. Once you have your business website in place, it is time to start marketing your site. You can promote your products or services on social networking sites. You can use internet content to promote traffic to your site. Creating a blog for your business is also quite helpful in driving traffic to your site. Although traffic does not mean sales, the more visitors you have, the better your chances are of making a sale.

It takes time to create and market a successful website. You can outsource the work if you do not have the time or do it yourself to save money. Once your website is popular and ranking well with Google, you will see your profits increase. Given enough time and effort, the internet can help your business become even more successful.

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The Internet: Taking the World by Storm and Not Slowing Down

The internet has taken the world by storm and it does not appear to be slowing down. Practically every business now has a website. If you hear of a business or see a commercial on television, you will almost always be directed to a website. Individuals have their own websites, as well. These range from freelance professionals that showcase their work with an online portfolio to personal blogs for entertainment purposes.

Schools use websites to inform parents of events, calendars and even let parents monitor their child’s grades online. Universities use websites to streamline the application process. Prospective students can fill out paperwork online or download the appropriate forms to print them. Financial aid is also handled on the internet. You can go to your college financial aid office for help, but most of the aid websites are self-explanatory. With just a few clicks and some information, you can qualify for monetary help right from your home computer.

With all of the millions of websites, search engines work very hard to rank the sites. Ranking is based on various factors, including the number of visitors (popularity) and relevance to a particular search. Google is probably the most well-known search engine and high Google rankings are the envy of every website owner. If you have a website, you need to do everything you can to ensure that it ranks well with Google. Google is, perhaps, the most important measure of success for any website.

Today, there is virtually nothing that you cannot look up on the internet. From the obscure information to the obvious, the answers are right in front of you. Using search engines like Google and Yahoo are the easiest way to find exactly what you need. The internet has made life, communication, business, and socialization faster, easier and, sometimes, more enjoyable.

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