Within a few years, Google has remarkably managed to lead the pack of Internet search engines and usurping the popularity of other engines that existed before it. The search engine has provided a new perspective to the concept of search. But over the years, the web has also gone through various changes making one wonder whether Google can still keep up. Is its place about to be taken over by some other search engine who can provide the world with a more innovative approach?

When you ask people about search engines, only one name comes to mind: Google.

Google has always been associated with Internet search. You can feel just how influential the search engine has become by simply looking at how it has become a fixture in most every user’s toolbar. It is also said to handle “around 70% of US Internet searches” and long gone are the days when the search engine wasn’t even this prevalent.

Before Google dominated Internet search, there were other players in the market. There was Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, AltaVista and a host of other search engines who aspired to become the industry leaders. But over time, most of these search engines have been demoted to being niche markets and the popularity that they once enjoyed before 1998 is but a memory that not everybody can remember. This was the time when Google grew into the phenomenon that it is today and changed the way people look at information searches through the Internet.

Google’s claim to fame was through a lot of hype about how distinctive its search technology was. Most search engines used unsatisfactory approaches to internet search so that many users found themselves looking for better options. Yahoo was a directory-based engine while AltaVista, for instance, analyzed the relevance of a page’s content through search algorithms. The problem with directory based engines was that they tend to come out with incomplete results. Those that use search algorithms are also flawed when it comes to relevant results. During that time, searching entailed going through different engines just so one can find exactly what he’s looking for.

Google was a refreshing change to this practice. Its search technology worked from an analysis of links between sites. This was how it determined a page’s relevance. The idea is that a site that has a lot of back links was deemed valuable according to users; hence, it has to get high search placements. This is how SEO worked before. It used link exchange strategies to increase back links which then translates to improved online popularity and a better position in Google.  While the technique still has the tendency to overlook content-rich and highly relevant sites with only a few back links to their names, it did bring out a new approach to search that seemed like the search engine actively interacted with users by identifying what was valuable to them.

Blackwood Productions aims to stay on top of industry trends to help clients improve their online visibility through efficient search engine optimization strategies. Contact us through this website for more details.