Early
search engines
Webmasters and content providers began
optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first
search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a
webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which
would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the
collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire
webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many
different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a
dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, limited only
by unique names. The search engines then sorted the information by
topic, and served results based on pages they had spidered. As the
number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized
the value of organic search listings, so popular search engines began
to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages
first. This was the start of a friction between search engine and
webmasters that continues to this day.
At first search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early
versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information
such as category and keyword meta tags. Meta-tags provided a guide to
each page's content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta tags,
causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines
abandoned their consideration of meta tags and instead developed more
complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that elevated a
limited number of words (anti-dictionary) and were more diverse,
including:
Text within the title tag
Domain name
URL directories and file names
HTML tags: headings, bold and emphasized text
Keyword density
Keyword proximity
Alt attributes for images
Text within NOFRAMES tags
Pringle, et al. (Pringle et al., 1998), also defined a number of
attributes within the HTML source of a page which were often
manipulated by web content providers attempting to rank well in search
engines. But by relying so extensively on factors that were still
within the webmasters' exclusive control, search engines continued to
suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better
results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their
SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless
pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters using a
bait-and-switch lure to display unrelated webpages. This led to the
rise of a new kind of search engine.
Your
Turn
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