Search Engine Year in Review - 2003

It’s been a big year in the Search Engine industry, but you don’t need to be an SEO expert to understand the impact the year’s developments will have on the average Website.

The following is a brief overview of the year’s search engine events, along with my thoughts on the significance of the news as it relates to online businesses.

January 15, 2003 Froogle shopping search engine beta site launched by Google.

From these humble beginnings, we expect to see Google fully dominate the market for product search in a few years.

January 21, 2003 Teoma Releases Version 2.0.

This search technology has been applauded by critics and was even thought to help Ask.com compete with Google. To date, however, it hasn’t really made any difference.

February 15, 2003 Google buys blogger (Pyra Labs).

The phenomenon of Web logs or ‘blogs’ has reached full steam in 2003, yet it remains unclear on exactly what Google will do with this purchase. Some search engine critics have suggested that the prevalence of hyperlinks in blogs is actually adding irrelevant content to Google’s search results.

February 19, 2003 Overture buys Alta Vista and FAST Search.

Overture and Google played cat and mouse in 2003 with regard to the paid-placement space. The once mighty Alta-Vista is now simply a traffic driver for Overture, but not nearly as effective as the Google.com site.

March 4, 2003 Google Issues a press release announcing the launch of content-targeted advertising.

With this step, Google went head-on against Overture in the paid search results category.

March 10, 2003 Disney closes Go.com.

Disney closes Go.com and switches to Overture results (since switched to Google Adwords). Once a top search destination in its own right, the shell of Go.com becomes a simple feeder site for paid search.

March 12, 2003 Dealtime acquires epinions.

Epinions was an early entrant into the shopping search engine space. This new entity later becomes shopping.com.

March 19, 2003 Yahoo! completes Inktomi acquisition.

Afraid of becoming too dependant on Google, and forking over too much of its traffic, Yahoo! buys a Google competitor. Inktomi is a formidable technology, but has yet to be fully implemented at Yahoo -– we’ll see how it goes.

April 21, 2003 Overture completes acquisition of Fast.

Along with the Alta-Vista acquisition, Fast was intended to boost search traffic for Overture.

April 24, 2003 Google acquires Applied Semantics.

This company of highly educated linguists was seen as a great compliment to Google -- the natural search abilities developed by Applied Semantics could help in search results, and their vast pool of paid search URLs became the property of AdWords.

April 28, 2003 Overture completes Alta Vista acquisition.

June 3, 2003 ValueClick acquires Search 123.

Smaller player acquires a much smaller version of other pay-for-performance search engines.

June 18, 2003 Google extends the AdSense program.

Google AdSense is extended to all Website owners in an affiliate-type model. The rest is history –- is there any site out there that hasn’t implemented Google AdWords to make a few extra bucks?

June 30, 2003 Overture responds to Google AdSense

Overture launches its own contextual advertising product, Content Match. The tit for tat battle between Overture and Google continues.

July 14, 2003 Yahoo! announces an agreement to buy Overture.

Yahoo! reaches an agreement to buy Overture (and, by default of earlier Overture acquisition, Alta Vista) in a deal valued in excess of $1.5 billion. Yahoo! had already placed Overture search results at the top of its listings, so it just bought the whole thing.