The Rise Of The Search Engine and The Employment Of Unethical Search Engine Marketing

Since web search engines were born in the 1990’s to carry out a need for users to find useful information on the Web, the methods used by search engines to amass, store and rank sites have changed dramatically.

During the 1990’s most search engine methods of data gathering, processing and analysis were very primitive. The algorithms used to categorise sites and give results were in their infancy. This dealt a haphazard experience for the search engine user. Users would usually receive little relevancy within their search results, either the results were of little use to their requirements, or the results were just not pertinent. Users had to spend much time (unless they got lucky) and be persistent with their searches, by trying different keywords, and by following numerous references highlighted by the search engine in the hope of identifying what they were looking for.

Search engine users found the process annoying, and this was borne out by the limited early growth of search engines during the first few years.

The search engine system was transformed around the turn of the new millennium, when the Google search engine started to use what Google termed ‘PageRank’ technology. This technology was developed to provide what Google co-founder Larry Page described as a user experience that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want”.

Google were probably the first search engine provider at that point in time to clearly appreciate that the key to their success would be to enhance the search engine user experience so effectively, that users would want to come back to Google again and again.

Google’s aim was to keep search engine users coming back to Google, and to attract competitor search engine users by providing the best user experience available at the time. Having the largest market share of search engine users would then enable them to execute their strategy of selling other services more effectively and profitably and cornering the search engine market. The primitiveness of early search engine algorithms meant that those seeking to advertise their sites via Online Marketing unethically were easily able to exploit search engines. Unethical Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as ‘Black Hat’ seeks to exploit Search Engine Placement ranking algorithms for short-term financial gain, offering a high Search Engine Placement listing very quickly.

An example of the many unethical processes used include ‘keyword stuffing’ and ‘doorway’ pages, where keywords are included in web pages in such a way that they are undetectable by the human eye, but noticed by search engines.The goal here is to make a search engine calculate the page to be more appropriate to a user searching for those keywords than it in fact is, and to return the web page higher up the search results ranking than it justifies. The end result with any of these processes is that the search engine users experience is worse by the return of unrelated or unsuitable search results. The risk to the search engine is that the search engine user could become dissatisfied and go elsewhere.

Google’s seeks to rank pages on the Web based on the number and supposed quality of web sites and pages elsewhere that refer back to it. In doing so, Google assumes that the more a web site is referenced by quality sites elsewhere on the Web, the greater that site is ranked and the higher up their search results that page or site will be listed.

This has made it much more tricky for an unethical Website Optimization Company to successfully influence search engine results within Google. Conversely it also has the required effect of reducing page rankings for web pages that use unethical search engine optimisation. Google, being the first search engine to adopt this technique, made sure its user experience was the very best on the market and the company has grown as a result, controlling the global search engine business today.

Figures from Hitbox confirm this, showing that Google’s worldwide share of the search engine sector hit a peak of 82.7% in December of 2008. Since then, Google has lost some traffic to other search engines. Figures for July 2009 show that Chinese search engine Baidu has an increased 8.87% market share, with Microsoft’s Bing up to 3.17%. Other who have lost market share in addition to Google include Yahoo! Search with 7.16% and AOL with 0.6%.

However, Google still dominates, and with July 2009 figures of 78.4% market share, Google’s competitors have what appears a tricky task of overpowering the global search engine market leader.