The push layer returns: Why ‘publish and wait’ is half a strategy
See how AI systems process content through five entry modes — and why relying on crawling alone limits visibility, speed, and revenue
Topic: Lycos
Historic recurrence in search: Why AI feels familiar and what’s next
AI is changing how people search – again. Learn what decades of search history can teach us about adapting to the next big shift.
SEO in an AI-powered world: What changed in just a year
What does SEO look like when AI tools become the first stop, not the last resort? A look at what’s changed – and what hasn’t.
Is Google biased? An SEO veteran’s perspective
This deep dive uses SEO tools and data analysis to explore the claims, controversies, and facts behind political search results.
Is ChatGPT the Google Search killer we’ve been expecting?
The next Google won’t do what Google does. Could that be OpenAI? Sam Altman shares his vision for combining LLMs and a search engine.
This day in search marketing history: February 1
Bing accused of copying Google's search results, plus: Microsoft tries to buy Yahoo, about this result, fake locksmith issues and more.
Indexing and keyword ranking techniques revisited: 20 years later
Learn how keyword-based ranking techniques have evolved – from the 'little old ladies' to the vector space model, to today.
Goodbye Search Engine Land, SMX and Third Door Media
After more than two decades of writing about search and online marketing, as well as speaking at and organizing dozens of conferences, it's time to hang up my e-spurs and move on to other adventures.
On Google’s 21st birthday, a look back in time
Revisit a 1999 interview with Google co-founder Larry Page by Search Engine Land's Chris Sherman.
SearchCap: Google family led icon, link building and SEO audits
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A basic SEO audit for small businessesSep 28, 2018 by Marcus Miller Most small businesses can perform a simple audit and improve their SEO considerably without involving an agency. Ten steps […]
Link building in the age of content skeptics
When Google appeared on the scene two decades ago, it quickly outshone popular search engines such as AltaVista, Infoseek and Lycos for two primary reasons. First, most search services were caught up in what would prove to be a fatal fad: turning their home pages into a “portal” for the internet while neglecting their core […]
Google marks 14 years as a public company
Today the search giant ranks as the world's third most valuable company.
Apocalypse for online search? Here’s how marketers can thrive
When Google launched in 1998, the big knock against it was that it would be excruciatingly difficult to monetize the traffic because all search traffic would be sent off of Google. The theory was that the company needed to be like Yahoo or Lycos — to have a wide-ranging portal. But Google scoffed at the […]
LISTEN: Danny Sullivan reflects on 21 years covering the search industry
In this week's podcast, our outgoing co-founder Danny Sullivan talks about the beginnings of his career documenting the search marketing industry, how SEO has evolved and why he's stepping away now.
SearchCap: Google My Business advanced verify, AdWords Editor update & Google Home featured snippets
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google My Business testing advanced verification process for spammy map categoriesOct 5, 2016 by Barry Schwartz Google tests a new spam prevention technique for local results called advanced verification. It uses […]
10 big changes with search engines over my 20 years of covering them
Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan looks at how search has changed over the two decades he's been writing about it.
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web
While Google will remove PageRank scores from public view in the coming weeks, the way those scores dramatically reshaped the web will remain.
SearchCap: Google Top Searches, Nest In Google Now & Google News In Spain Closes?
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google To Close Freebase, Which Helped Feed Its Knowledge Graph Freebase announces they will close up shop after migrating their data and APIs to Wikidata. How will this impact the Google […]
SearchCap: Google Redirecting Penalties, Robot.txt 20th & Google Wiretapping Case
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Supreme Court Rules Street View “Wiretapping” Class Action Can Proceed Against Google According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Supreme Court will not review a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of […]
Robots.txt Celebrates 20 Years Of Blocking Search Engines
Today is the 20th anniversary of the robots.txt directive being available for webmasters to block search engines from crawling their pages. The robots.txt was created by Martijn Koster in 1994 while he was working at Nexor after having issues with crawlers hitting his sites too hard. All major search engines back then, including WebCrawler, Lycos […]
Google May Be Forced To Pay $1 Billion To Patent Troll
A New York-based “patent troll” called Vringo, through its subsidiary I/P engine, successfully sued Google, Microsoft, AOL and others using two patents related to search advertising. The plaintiff won approximately $30 million at trial in 2012. Google was asked to pay $15.8 million of that amount. Yet plaintiffs were also seeking ongoing royalties, which the court has now awarded. […]
Google Loses Again In AdWords Patent Infringement Case
A judge has determined patent-holding company Vringo is entitled to additional royalties from Google in a patent infringement case involving Google AdWords. The order stems from a case brought by Vringo subsidiary I/P Engine in 2011 that claimed filtering technology used in Google AdWords violated two of its patents. A jury found in favor of […]
A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this. Better than the one-sentence send-off Yahoo gave you today, when announcing your July 8 closure date. But then again, you always were the bright child neglected by your parents. The Amazing AltaVista You appeared on the search engine scene in December 1995. You made us go “woah” when you […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 1, 2013
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google Settles With France: No ‘Link Tax,’ But €60 Million Media Fund Google has avoided getting hit with a “link tax” in France by agreeing to create a €60 million “Digital […]
Microsoft Sued By Company That Won Patent Lawsuit Against Google In 2012
New York-based Vringo has sued Microsoft over two patents that pertain to the ranking and placement of ads in search results. The patents were originally issued in the early ’90s and owned for a long time by Lycos, which later sold them. The patents in question are 6,314,420 and 6,775,664, referred to in the complaint (below) as the […]
2012 Yahoo! Year In Review: Over 500 Top Searches In 50+ Categories
Last year, Yahoo! celebrated ten years of sharing its annual Year In Review feature, marking the occasion by releasing 30 categories of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2011, one of the biggest lists up to that point in time. For 2012, Yahoo! one-upped themselves by providing us with the top 10 most popular searches […]
Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”
That didn’t take long. In my coverage today about the new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature, I detailed how part of it gave hefty ammunition to claims that Google is abusing its dominant position in search. The anti-trust charges have now already started. Here’s the short story why. Imagine, Sending People To Other Stores! One of […]
Does The FairSearch White Paper On Google Being Anticompetitive Hold Up?
FairSearch, a group of search companies including Microsoft which lobbies that Google is too dominant, has sent a white paper outlining its anti-trust concerns about Google to the 50 state attorneys general in the US. Below, a review and some fact checking of the paper. You’ll find the paper here, if you wish to read […]
Search Engines & 9/11: Remembrances Today; Some Thoughts Of Then
The major search engines are all memorializing the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on their home pages today. Below, a recap, some some reflections on two major ways search engines have changed since that tragic day, in terms of news coverage and disaster help. Google Home Page There’s no special logo on Google for the anniversary, […]
SEO Remains A Viable Marketing Strategy For Anyone
Ah, another SEO is dead post from a non-SEO to get the blood rushing on an otherwise calm weekend. I’ve been ignoring these more and more lately, but in the wake of Google’s Farmer Update, it looks like everyone could use some history lessons. Don’t depend solely on SEO, but don’t neglect it, either.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 20, 2011
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Huge Earnings Overshadowed By Leadership Change Google just announced Q4 and full year 2010 earnings. They also dropped the bombshell that Larry Page would be taking over as CEO, with […]
Study: Google “Favors” Itself Only 19% Of The Time
For the past year or so, there’s been a rising meme that Google is altering its search results in ways to favor itself over competitors. Now a new study is out showing the opposite. Google is far more likely not to show its own products in the first spot of its search results. The survey […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 16, 2010
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Q&A: comScore’s New “Core Search” & “Explicit Core Search” Figures Today, comScore is releasing an additional set of search market share metrics designed to better reflect “core” search activity, something that’s […]
Lycos Sold For $36 Million
Lycos, that old search engine, was reportedly sold for $36 million. Ybrant Digital, an Indian-based digital marketing solutions company, bought Lycos from Korean-based Daum. Daum purchased Lycos back in 2004 for $95.4 million—and that was a mere fraction of the of the $12.5 billion Spanish telecom company Terra paid for Lycos at the peak of […]
Once The Most Powerful Person In Search, Srinija Srinivasan Leaves Yahoo
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, the most powerful person in search was arguably Yahoo’s Srinija Srinivasan. If Yahoo’s was the “gateway” to the web in the way some think Google is today, Srinivasan was the chief gatekeeper. And now after 15 years, she’s leaving Yahoo. Srinivasan was Yahoo’s “Ontological Yahoo,” among other titles including being […]
A guide to Google: Origins, history and key moments in search
Google, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the most popular search engine in the world, with a commanding market share of over 80% globally and just under 80% in the U.S. While we don’t have any figures direct from the company, it’s estimated that billions of searches – or trillions per […]
The Google Decade: Search In Review, 2000 To 2009
The 2000s were notable as the first full decade of consumer search. The first decade ever where you could try to sum up what happened in search, as a consumer product. And what happened, in a word, was Google. In the 1990s, Google barely existed. If search were a religion, it was polytheistic. There were […]
4 Comparison Search Tools You May Not Know About … But Should
I may be the only one who noticed, but it seems to me that 2009 saw an unusual amount of new comparison search tools released. Perhaps it was the launch of Bing, or the growth of real-time search? I don’t know, but something inspired programmers to develop new tools and sites to let us compare […]
10 Year Retrospective: Search Engine Strategies To SMX: Search Marketing Expo
Ten years ago today, I had the privilege of organizing the first ever search marketing conference. On this anniversary, a look back at how things were then and have they’ve changed in a decade. In 1999, search marketing itself was about five years old. People had been doing search engine optimization to generate traffic from […]
Live Blogging Yahoo Investor Day 2009
It’s Yahoo Investor Day, where Yahoo is briefing institutional investors and financial analysts on the company. I’m here for the morning portion, and I’ll be live blogging out of it. You can also watch the live web cast here. Bartz Welcomes Carol Bartz, CEO, on stage. Saying thing they have great opportunity. Lots to fix. […]