Who is Better Off with One Dominant Player?
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Does the idea that your online business relies so much on Google for its traffic let you sleep easy at night? It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way. Keep reading to see what one veteran online business owner thinks.
This is a very interesting time we live in right now, from a technology standpoint. It is truly a unique and enriching experience to watch a brand new industry rise from nowhere and see it evolve and change its shape right before your very eyes. Something close in terms of scope and impact might have been the revolution Henry Ford started with the creation of the assembly line, which permitted the mass production of automobiles. This led to a corresponding reduction in price, which made them available to far more people than just the very rich -- and the world was never the same. This is also true of the Internet which has changed not only all businesses on a global scale, but how we think and communicate; even how we evolve as human beings will most likely be impacted by the advent of the Internet. This is heady stuff.
One of the many reasons for the breadth and scope of the impact the Internet has had on society is its ability to place even the most obscure information at everyone's fingertips. Notice I said everyone's fingertips. I think that’s a very important point. It used to be that knowledge was in the hands of the few and privileged, and in most instances that factor by itself allowed them to maintain that status, until now. So it stands to reason that the cog behind this grand scale machine that is literally moving society toward a more enlightened path is the power of search. Literally, how we find stuff.
Back in the day the Internet's very first version of search was called “Archie.” Per Wikipedia, “It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames.”
Then came “Wandex,” which was an index created by a web crawler developed by a MIT graduate. Then Aliweb, then WebCrawler, then Lycos – you get the idea. Soon thereafter there was a explosion of search engines, including some big ones such as Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista. The interesting thing is all of them worked differently, looked different, and provided very different results. So most often if you were looking for a particular product or service or even an obscure piece of information, you would hit two or three of the search engines until you found what you were looking for.
Next: The Good Old Days >>
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