If the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo does happen, the "postmortems" on Yahoo will come fast and furious. Perhaps the first of these is from the Mercury News, which recounts the history of Google and Yahoo's early relationship and how the latter essentially "made" Google, which went on to become its most formidable competitor. The piece indirectly argues that Yahoo's failure to recognize Google as a threat -- despite Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's unsuccessful early attempt to buy it -- is partly responsible for the company's predicament today. The article also argues, with interviews of many form [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | Stats: History

Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You'd dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you're just for women, apparently. [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Ask 3D | Ask: Business Issues | Ask: General | Channel: Search | Stats: History

Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude. Albeit, we've seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft got together on the Sitemaps protocol, and Google, Ask.com, and Microsoft are now anonymizing log file data. Subsequently, Google called for international privacy standards. The November 2007 FTC public forum on behavioral advertising also [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | SEM Industry: Community | SEM Industry: General | Stats: History

Google has a special logo up on the Google home page today. The Google logo is made up of legos, to celebrate Lego's 50 year birthday. Google's culture has always had a special place for Lego. Google's first servers were "modded" up with Legos. The Google founders have admitted to having a special "fondness" towards Legos, and we all know that computer geeks can't get enough of their legos. Google has Lego art in their offices. Lego fans have built Google logos in Lego, and so have Googlers themselves. If you visit Google.com, you will see the logo. You won't see it after you do a searc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: General | Google: Logos | Stats: History

Children, gather 'round. When I was a boy, we didn't have Digg. We didn't have Slashdot. When we wanted a big traffic rush, we had to walk eight miles in the snow to Yahoo Picks -- Yahoo Picks Of The Week & Picks Of The Day -- and we liked it. But now, Yahoo Picks is gone. Bow your head to the news that TechCrunch highlighted today. Let a tear or two flow down your face as you read the formal announcement: We're sorry to say that Picks has stopped updating. After 12 years, we're moving on to new projects and fresh ways of highlighting cool sites across the Web. We'll still be here in d [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: History | Yahoo: Other

As I write this on New Year's day, I can't help but reflect on how SEO has changed during the more than 12 years since I first started optimizing websites. I was browsing through my hard-drive looking for a document I had saved that had various article ideas in it, when I stumbled upon a file from the year 2000 in which I had written an outline for a potential SEO workshop I was thinking of teaching. I never did do that workshop in 2000, but did eventually hold the first of our High Rankings Seminars two years later. The seminars had a good run from 2002-2007, but this year I decided to in [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | SEO: General | Stats: History

Each month, I compile Search Month -- a recap of all the stories that have happened relating to search, categorized by topic. I thought it would be fun to take all the Search Months over the past year and produce this edition of Search Year 2007. It was far more work than I imagined, but I hope you'll find this at-a-glance guide to what happened in search during 2007 to be helpful. At-a-glance might be a stretch. This is a massive post, and I'm sure some people might feel a bit of overload. So, here's some guidance as to how things are organized. In many categories, I tried to pick the bigg [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search Month | Search Year | SearchCap | Stats: History

If I were writing the local County Cross Country Ski Club newsletter, a retrospective might cover two or three minor changes in the field, and a watershed moment or two. Primitive skis were used by Vikings as much as 5,000 years ago. In about 1460, someone in Scandinavia discovered that you could climb hills easily with a "herringbone" technique rather than removing your skis and walking up. In the 1990’s, someone invented skate-skiing and they added the freestyle event to the Olympics while maintaining "classic" technique as an event as well. Those wishing to be in even better physica [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search | SEM Industry: Community | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: General | Stats: History

The Google home page is sporting the special logo above, celebrating the company's ninth birthday, with one of the Gs turned into a nine. But wait? Didn't Google just turn 10? Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday that I posted earlier this month covers how yes, Google's domain name turned 10 years old on September 15, but the company itself celebrates its incorporation date in September 1998. But when is that incorporation date: Sept. 7 or Sept. 27? Google has celebrated both dates in the past, using Sept. 27 more lately, such as today. Wikipedia says Sept. 7 is the i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: General | Stats: History

The AFP has clearly been waiting for September 15, so it could trot out today's "Google is 10 years old" story. But the company itself doesn't count tomorrow as its 10th birthday. In fact, knowing exactly when Google's birthday is depends on your point of view. Some milestones to consider below, which make Google as old as 12 and as young as 9. Plus, more special Google birthday logos. NOTE: See Google 10th Birthday Site: Interactive Timeline, Project 10x100 To Improve The World & Share Your Google Stories for news of the official Google 10th birthday site launched since this wa [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: General | Stats: History

It's Search Engine Strategies San Jose next week. For Chris Sherman and I, it's our swan song. This is the last SES event that either of us will program, with our search marketing conference efforts going forward focused on our own Search Marketing Expo (SMX) events. But we've put our all into making the last SES event great, and I wanted to share some of the many things we've organized, plus how to meet up with Chris and I for the show. We've got a Sphinn lunch set, as well as laptop stickers for readers. Some quick facts. The very first SES event (and the first search marketing conference, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | SEM Industry: Conferences | Stats: History

I Fought the Law from the New York Times tells the story of how Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone abandoned pursuing a legal degree and learned his true passion was for internet companies. Lanzone attended Emory University's School of Law in Atlanta. He then worked for Justice Hugh P. Thompson at the Supreme Court of Georgia, and then had a summer job at law firm after his freshman year. But the law wasn't his thing, he wasn't excited with it. So he decided to go earn an M.B.A. degree, which he said made him see the world "in color." From there he had an internship at KnowX, which gave him the des [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Employees | Channel: Strategy | Stats: History

In preparation for those trying AOL tomorrow as part of our first Google-Free Friday, I thought it would be helpful to give some background on AOL in search. AOL has long offered search -- and even owned several web crawling technologies -- over the years. Don't forget to read AOL: Tomorrow's Google Free Friday Alternative for tips to what services to use from AOL in your searching! 1995-1999 June 1995: AOL buys WebCrawler, one of the major crawler-based search engines of its day. November 1996: AOL announces deal to sell WebCrawler to Excite (which itself later gets sold to Infospace [...]

Related Topics: AOL: General | Channel: Strategy | Stats: History

The house that helped build Google from the USA Today looks back at how Susan Wojcicki's decision to let Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rent out space in her garage changed her life and ours. Wojcicki purchased her 4-bedroom home on 232 Santa Margarita Ave. for about $600,000 and rented out the garage to Page and Brin for $1,700 a month (Google later bought the house). That decision helped create the most popular search engine in the world and changes Wojcicki's future forever. Wojcicki became Google's 18th employee and is now the vice president of product management for Go [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: Employees | Google: General | Stats: History

Ten years ago today, I created Search Engine Watch. Now I'm here at Search Engine Land, but since I ran SEW for 95 percent of its existence, I thought it would be nice to look back and cover how it evolved and changed over the years. So here's a stroll down memory lane. Some of those who know my work might be thinking that this 10 years thing sounds familiar. That's because on April 17, 2006, I wrote My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines. It covered my personal 10 year anniversary, which started with the predecessor to Search Engine Watch, "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines." [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | SEM Industry: Blogs & Forums | Stats: History

The Inside Google Book Search Blog has a post from Matthew Gray about how he designed a program to plot the world based on the "frequency of its locations mentioned in books." Google Operating System adds that Matthew Gray was the creator of the first ever web search engine, The World Wide Web Wanderer. Gray has gone full circle from starting a search engine, to starting a web analytics company, earning two degrees, joining a hardware startup, starting a wireless location company and now back to working in search. This time, Gray he is working for Google as a software engineer in their Bost [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Book Search | Google: Employees | Google: Maps & Local | Stats: History

Yesterday I wrote a long piece looking at Microsoft's moves in search since 1997. Bill Bliss, who I described as overseeing Microsoft's "first era" of human-powered search, has added some great comments on missteps within the company ranging from not buying search technology earlier and ignoring the Google threat for so long in part because of MSN's constantly changing management. Bill's emailed me some of this material privately in the past, so I'm glad he had a chance to share his perspective publicly. You can read his full comments below or as part of the original story. Bill's bi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: General | Stats: History

Microsoft's top search executive leaving company from the Seattle PI covers Microsoft's Christopher Payne reportedly leaving the company. The AP also reports similar news from its sources. Payne took over search efforts at Microsoft back in 2003. He oversaw what I'd call Microsoft's "second era" of search, that of developing a crawler-based search engine to take on Google. Below, some history on the second era, plus the company's "first era" of human-powered search and how a reorganization under the direction of Steve Berkowitz marks a new "third era" of battlin [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Employees | Microsoft: General | Stats: History

On March 3rd, Flickr turns three. Flickr is in many ways the company that helped define "Web 2.0" and was its poster child for quite some time. And Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, in March, 2005, after only a year in existence and, even then, a longish courtship was one of the best consumer moves Yahoo's made in the past couple years. Flickr and the community mindset it brought along, not to mention tagging, have been widely integrated across numerous Yahoo properties. Here's the Business 2.0 article, "The Flickrization of Yahoo" that appeared in late 2005. Indeed, Flickr has had a "cultura [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search Engines: Photo & Image Search | Search Features: Tagging | Stats: History | Yahoo: Flickr

How Yahoo Blew It by Wired, tells the story of Yahoo's failures over the past years. The article starts off explaining that Yahoo could of bought Google, but Google turned down the $3 billion offer made by Yahoo. The article then summarizes Google recent success after their IPO and says, "And what must infuriate Semel: This could have been Yahoo." Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, decided they would not pay more than $3 billion and decided to go at the search game on their own. You are taken through Yahoo's partnerships and acquisitions over the years, and you clearly see how Yahoo had to "put th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: History | Yahoo: General