Look back at February 1998 and you find a web where search meant one thing: a “directory”. Search ran on the logic of a library catalog, and that period of cataloguing belongs to those same years. We are talking about a time when the search engine returned sites more or less as the sites described themselves. Yahoo in February 1998 was built on exactly that logic.
The inspiration for the project that would end it came much earlier, in 1996, to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. What the two of them started was simple and rather beautiful. Good results needed more than the content a web page hands us, and that extra could be worked out from the web itself, with an “automatic” algorithm. What formed around a site, rather than on it, could indicate the site’s quality. The logic ran like this: the better a site is, the more links it collects from outside itself. Their Stanford paper sets the argument out in full, and the IEEE milestone record dates the work from 1996 to 1998. So it began, with “Hello PageRank technology”, and Google started serving searches. Towards the end of 1998, Google was live inside a Stanford University web page.
1999 was still project time for Google. On his own page during his Stanford University years, Larry Page wrote about the Google work and shared the logo from those first days.
Search Engines and Google in the 2000s
Yahoo’s biggest disadvantage was charging for registration in its “directory” system. A free alternative to it appeared on 5 June 1998, when Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel built a directory of their own. The project started under the name NewHoo, was bought by Netscape in October 1998, and came to be known as DMOZ because it was published at directory.mozilla.org. Beginning as the Open Directory Project, the Open Directory stated that it would accept only quality sites into its listings, that paid inclusion would never happen under any circumstances, and that editors would be chosen from people volunteering for the work. DMOZ.Org became the center of the world’s internet overnight and turned into the base source for every search engine anyone had heard of. Sites listed in DMOZ always came out in front in searches.
Google in those years indexed pages and listed them according to PageRank logic. It pulled DMOZ data directly and published part of it on its own pages. Getting into the Yahoo directory, on the other hand, cost money.
2003: Systems Improve and Results Get Better
Google’s position in the market was not yet settled, and AltaVista, Yahoo and the local search engines were each a serious rival. Google was working towards better results while its rivals concentrated on meta tags. Calling it a mania for opening search engines would not be wrong. I am talking about a period in which millions of search engines opened.
The screen above belongs to Mynet, at that point Turkey’s largest portal and the operator of its own search engine. If you have never seen a national portal of this kind, the 2005 snapshot in the Wayback Machine shows what one looked like in the years this account covers. Every sizeable market had one, and each of them lost the same fight.
The biggest SEO campaign of the period was the phrase “Get yourself registered with millions of search engines in a single click”. The largest websites of the era were caught up in the craze too and added a “search engine registration” section to their services. The strange part is that it actually worked. Hundreds of thousands of search engines really could be submitted to with one click.
A www3 craze started and affected a great many web pages. Sites were setting their subdomain prefix not as “www” but as “www3”. Google was naturally caught up in it as well, as we can see when we look at Google in 2003.
2005: Google and the Search Market
It became a year in which Google gained a serious advantage over local rivals in many countries. Mynet, which ran its own search engine at the time, found itself in real difficulty against Google. Nor can you say that the search engines other than Google were as willing to improve themselves as Google was. Google was meeting its visitors with something new every day and increasing its share of the sector.
If DMOZ is new to you, our What Was DMOZ article looks at the directory and the thinking behind it.
In Turkey we were around ten people in that period, and we genuinely took Google seriously. We did not even have a common view among ourselves about the other search engines, because their ranking logic was thoroughly confused and undefined. Yahoo was certainly a search engine with a say in the market, but coming to a good position in its rankings meant being added to the “Directory” section, and that cost money. In those same years DMOZ was a great power, and the visitors came from Google.
More links means front position was absolutely the base logic. In a period when nobody speaking Turkish was working at Google yet, every kind of illegal practice went unpunished. In that period when the holes in the search engine ran riot and junk sites covered the internet, the single point to lean on was DMOZ.
My own DMOZ editorship began in 2004, and along with all the other editors I spent my time clearing out junk sites; the oldest archive record I could find dates from 2005. The visitors of that period genuinely owe the DMOZ, that is the ODP, editors a great deal for a better internet. The number of Turkish sites listed in DMOZ in 2005 was still around 18,000. Over the ten years that followed, DMOZ would not change at all, only the listed sites would change and the interface would stay the same. AOL closed the directory on 17 March 2017. Part of the volunteer editorship carried the work on under the name Curlie.
Search Engines Around 2007
In August 2006 Rohit Bhargava published a five-item list on social media optimization and revised those items in the years that followed. The same year Google bought YouTube and began cleaning out junk sites with the filter systems it had developed.
SandBox is a filtering system applied to new sites, and this filter aims to prevent newly established sites, the ones described as junk sites, from entering search results. Google never documented anything under that name. The behavior was observed from the outside and named by the SEO community, which is worth keeping in mind whenever you read about it.
After the cleaned-up sites, Google took its share of the market to the highest levels. Thanks to its advertising programs, Google grew stronger with every passing day. Most of the local search engines abandoned their own work and started making use of Google’s results.
The Birth of SEO and Its General History
The term “Search Engine Optimization” came into use internationally around 1997, with John Audette and Bruce Clay credited for its earliest use and for spreading it. In Turkey it came up around 2006, as the abbreviation for the person doing this work. It was born as a line of business in its own right. Along with Sandbox, professional SEO specialists came to matter a great deal. In 2007, though, the total number of people occupied with it was very small, and that such a line of work existed was not widely known. Those were the years when we had real difficulty explaining the concept of SEO during our own advertising agency period.
After ADSL and the other developments, the internet grew very quickly in Turkey. It affected a great many sectors deeply. Companies with a web page that came up in the top positions on Google increased their earnings considerably, while sector leaders investigated the reasons for their falling sales and changed the way they thought about web pages.
The corporate web page idea in those years meant a page with no “interactive” application in it, a page on which nothing was sold. That corporate web page logic ended or changed, and SEO was met whether it was wanted or not. Companies saw that they had to be present on Google and started looking for an SEO consultant for the first time.
We moved into tourism at exactly the point when the SEO concept took off, and we paused our SEO work. Many new firms were born in that period and started doing SEO. With terms like SEO Consultant, Corporate SEO and SEO Services, the word SEO began to be used for the general name of the work rather than for the person doing it.
When the word SEO first came up we discussed it on some foreign forums, and on Turkish ones we made an effort to find a Turkish equivalent. One candidate abbreviation, “AMA”, was also an everyday Turkish word, which is part of why nothing stuck and we ended up adopting the word SEO untranslated.
Google Improved Its Filter System Every Year
Sandbox stood for long years as the favorite filter system. An internet cleared of junk sites was cleaner. Firms or individuals doing “wrong SEO” without running junk sites carried on existing on the internet, though. Google had to develop the Sandbox logic for that reason and began applying many filter systems at the same time, one after another. The results of the filter systems differed from one another. I am talking about filters whose effects differ: ones that keep you out of the first five pages, ones that do not list you on the first page, ones that will not let you past third place.
An advanced filter system is in place now. Off-site effect is not as powerful as it used to be either. The listing logic essentially stands as the subjects covered in Inbound Marketing.
SEO has become a very serious market today, and ranking in the top positions on Google has entered the goals of a great many companies. Compared with the earlier periods competition has grown considerably, and the number of clients has grown with it.
What Changed After This Account Was Written
This account was written in 2015, and the years since have moved the ground under it. Google went mobile first, which made the phone version of a site the version that gets indexed rather than a secondary copy of it. HTTPS turned into a baseline expectation instead of an advantage. Page experience arrived as a set of numbers anyone can measure in the Core Web Vitals, so site speed stopped being a matter of opinion. A long run of core updates aimed at content quality then shifted the weight away from the signals gathered around a page and towards what the page actually does for the person reading it.
The directory era this account opens with has a clear endpoint. DMOZ closed in 2017, and with it the last working piece of catalog logic left search. What took its place reads pages, and increasingly answers from them: AI summaries now sit above the classic list of ten results for a growing share of queries. The question from 1998 has not changed at all. How do you tell a good page from a bad one without taking the page’s own word for it? Only the machinery answering it has changed.
Google's First Name: Backrub
The name that comes to mind first when anyone says search today went by Backrub in its first year. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the system at Stanford University in 1996, and it took its name from analyzing the links pointing back at pages.
This is more than a piece of trivia: it shows that search engines rested their ranking, from the very beginning, not on a page's own claim about itself but on the references other pages gave it. That is where the idea we now call authority comes from. The name became Google in 1997, inspired by googol, a one followed by a hundred zeros.
Where the name came from, how the system worked and how that idea turned into today's logic of backlinks are covered in detail in our article on what Backrub was.
