Origins of the Web

Origins of the web

The Web started off behind the idea of the free flow of information as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. He was working at CERN in Europe. CERN had a somewhat web-like environment in that many people were coming and going and worked on many different projects.

Tim created a site that described how the Web worked and placed it live on the first server at info.cern.ch. Europe had very little backing or interest in the Web back then, so U.S. colleges were the first groups to set up servers. Tim added links to their server locations from his directory known as the Virtual Library.

Current link popularity measurements usually show college web pages typically have higher value than most other pages do. This is simply a function of the following:

1. The roots of the WWW started in lab rooms at colleges. It was not until the mid to late 1990s that the Web became commercialized.
2.  The web contains self-reinforcing social networks.
3.  Universities are pushed as sources of authority.
4.  Universities are heavily funded.
5.  Universities have quality controls on much of their content.

The Web did not have sophisticated search engines when it began. The most advanced information gatherers of the day primitively matched file names. You had to know the name of the file you were looking for to find anything. The first file that matched was returned. There was no such thing as search relevancy. It was this lack of relevancy that lead to the early popularity of directories such as Yahoo!.

Many search engines such as AltaVista, and later Inktomi, were industry leaders for a period of time, but the rush to market and lack of sophistication associated with search or online marketing prevented these primitive machines from having functional business models.

Overture was launched as a pay-per-click search engine in 1998. While the Overture system (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing) was profitable, most portals were still losing money. The targeted ads they delivered grew in popularity and finally created a functional profit generating business model for large-scale general search engines.

As the Internet grew in popularity, people realized it was an incredibly cheap marketing platform. Compare the price of spam (virtually free) to direct mail (~ $1 each). Spam fills your inbox and wastes your time.

Information retrieval systems (search engines) must also fight off aggressive marketing techniques to keep their search results relevant. Search engines market their problems as spam, but the problem is that they need to improve their algorithms.

It is the job of search engines to filter through the junk to find and return relevant results.

There will always be someone out there trying to make a quick buck. Who can fault some marketers for trying to find holes in parasitic search systems that leverage others’ content without giving any kickback?

Though I hate to quote a source I do not remember, I once read that one in three people believe the top search result is the most relevant document relating to their search. Imagine the power associated with people finding your view of the world first. Whatever you are selling, someone is buying!

I have been quoted as a source of information on Islam simply because I wrote about a conversation I had with a person from Kuwait who called me for help on the web. I know nothing about Islam, but someone found my post in a search engine…so I was quoted in their term paper. College professors sourced some sites I am embarrassed to admit I own.

Sometimes good things happen to you and sometimes the competition gets lucky. Generally the harder you work, and the more original and useful your site is, the more often you will get lucky.

As easy as it is to get syndicated with useful interesting and unique information, it is much harder to get syndicated with commercial ideas, especially if the site does not add significant value to a transaction. Often times links associated with commercial sites are business partnerships.

Many people do well to give information away and then attach a product to their business model. You probably would have never read this e-book if I did not have a blog associated with it. On the same note, it would also be significantly easier for me to build links to SEOBook.com if I did not sell this e-book on it.

Depending on your skills, faults, and business model, sometimes it is best to make your official voice one site and then sell stuff on another, or add the commercial elements to the site after it has gained notoriety and trust. Without knowing you, it is hard to advise you which road to take, but if you build value before trying to extract profits, you will do better than if you do it the other way around.

If my site was sold as being focused on search and I wrote an e-book or book about power searching, it would be far easier for me to get links than running a site about SEO. For many reasons, the concept of SEO is hated in many circles. The concept of search is much easier to link at.

Sometimes by broadening, narrowing, or shifting your topic it becomes far easier for people to reference you.

As the Web grew, content grew faster than technology did. The primitive nature of search engines promoted the creation of content, but not the creation of quality content. Search engines had to rely on the documents themselves to state their purpose. Most early search engines did not even use the full page content either, relying instead on page title and document name to match results. Then came along meta tags.