The internet itself has been around in one form or another since the late 70s. Originally it was designed by the military as a primitive way of sending encrypted messages intended only for their recipients. If you have ever used an electronic bulletin board, well this was similar, only networked.

Eventually, as most military applications do, the internet made its way into mainstream civilian application. The concept of the Internet, or the Web as it was sometimes also referred to as, didnt really take hold on the public psyche until the late 80s. That incarnation of the internet was somewhat slow, cumbersome and limited by both the number of sites available, and the cost of registering a domain name and hosting a site. With the advent of cheaper hosting and the reduction of the cost of registering domains, the popularity of the internet really started to take off in the early 90s. The media jumped on the bandwagon, and so ensued what was something of a mini cultural revolution.

Companies started registering domain names and setting up what were mainly informational web sites, or sales jargon online if you like. The real problem is that people only really knew about a website by reading the address from some offline source such as a sales brochure, business card or advertisement. When the consumer went to the site, they were presented with little more than they could get by reading the real world glossy paper brochure.

Along came the search engines to solve the problem of finding web sites amongst the vast majority of sites which were popping up on the internet all around the world. The original search engines were quite clunky, slow and easily manipulated. Various spamming methods were adopted by the less scrupulous web site owners to modify the results shown by the search engines. Tricks such as repeating the keyword name over and over again at the bottom of the html page, and then changing the font to white were often adopted, as well as copying the same page over and over again and linking them all together to boost a sites ranking.

Search engines soon cottoned on to these methods, and eventually the majority of them were filtered out. For the most part, databases were not very clean, and this combined with the suspect (but evolving) algorithms left the majority of the public disenchanted, and genuine website marketers scratching their heads at how to tweak their sites, and what to expect next. The searching public were yet to see a search algorithm that they were more than happy with.

Various companies such as yahoo.com and dmoz.org tried to circumvent the search conundrum by creating indexes of categorised, human approved web sites. For a while these proved quite popular, but were very difficult to get listed in, and required the directory companies to employ an army of developers, moderators and approvers to keep the directory running and clean. Of course, some of these were paid, but the majority were volunteers. So considering the limited results that could be obtained from a directory, the searching public seemed to employ a combination approach when conducting their searches, of both directories and search engines.

It was at this time, that search engine and directory companies started merging and acquiring competitors via takeover, as the forecasters must have seen the benefit of having a combination of both search and directory (and less competitors!) It was also around this time, that many engines and directories started charging for guaranteed paid inclusion. The future looked dim. It was at this time that a newcomer to the scene decided to take their chances with a newly created algorithm. Yes, google was here! To the rest of the world, this must have seemed like an insane time to be entering the market. And a free search engine at that, with free submission for your site! But once google started to increase in popularity, people saw the benefit of their superior algorithm and search results, nice uncluttered home page, and free submission, and hey, google just sounds so cool anyway! The term to google it is now commonly used in relation to doing a search, and it seems the public cant get enough. Google has been innovative in other areas of the industry also. They have several indexes based on different topics, and some news archive services. Another innovation google implemented was picture search. Google did go on to implement paid inclusion via AdWords and AdSense, but basic submission to the index has always been free. Googles spider also seems to be the most active, and often times linking to a new site from an older site which is already indexed will often get the new site indexed more quickly than if you submitted the site manually to google.

Recent happenings in the world of search include Microsofts MSN search which has recently been released after an extended BETA testing stage. On initial testing of the service, it seems to be quite robust and give good output. Microsofts foray into search was meant to cause great waves, and rumours were that google were dreading the day it was finally released. But in my opinion, unless they come up with something more innovative, such as google has and continues to do, at this point they are not much of a threat. The only threat I foresee in the future, is if Microsoft hard codes the search page into Internet Explorer, but I dont see this happening, as consumer groups and the governments anti-competition lawyers would be down on them in a flash. So in the search arena, I guess well just have to wait and see, but in the meantime, it is wise to be tweaked and indexed for both google and MSN search.

Google also recently shook up the free email market with their first offering called Gmail. Gmail is a free internet based email service offering users a 1GB account, and new search capabilities within the system itself. At the time of writing Gmail is still in beta testing stage, but with googles initial announcement, Microsoft and yahoo quickly countered and increased the limit of their previously measly offerings. Once again, I guess well have to watch this space.

At the time when search engines were first being introduced to the internet, and the first primitive indexes, directories and listings compiled, a variety of internet marketing gurus started to appear on the scene. At first, the majority of these marketing experts were simply marketing people who had made their way from the real paper-based world to the electronic world of bits and bytes that is the internet. Marketing methods promoted often included a heavy slant towards sales copy, colours and formatting of your web site appearance, and then eventually submission to all the directories and search engines which started to appear around the net. These gurus also promoted the use metadata, keywords and other elements within the html. Eventually we were subjected to the unsightly and annoying barrage of spam email which internet marketers promoted. Fortunately for the internet marketing gurus, they also had the rights to distribute the software required for their clients to send mass email and make millions! (sic)

Finally we made it to where we are today.
But where are we? And where are we headed? Visit my website, and youll find all my predictions for the future, and the most absolute up to date, complete list of tools, tips and resources that I think you should be using right now, today, to be successful.