2005 – The
Year of the Goog
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
December 20 2005
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The Yule season, which offers a brief lull in the general rush (except
for us, of course) is a good time to take a look back on the year that
has almost passed. For search engine marketers, 2005 was a tumultuous
year full of contradictions. Search marketing became more challenging,
even as the search engines became better at finding and sorting data.
The business of search marketing became more competitive, even as newer
SEO firms dropped by the wayside over the past twelve months. The user-popularity
of the major search engines has not changed that much but the playing field
they compete on has shifted enormously. The one constant throughout 2005
was the meteoric rise of Google. While the year was full of activity, invention
and innovation, 2005 was the year of the Goog.
A brief glance at a year of publishing weekly newsletters shows how much
has changed in the world of search marketing and the business of search.
The links in this piece all lead to the StepForth newsletter the topic was
drawn from. It has been a long and very interesting year. Knowing a little
bit of what is coming in the first few months of 2006, I strongly suggest
next year will be even more interesting for search watchers.
January
In January, MSNsearch released its own algorithmic search results, making
it the third major stand-alone search engine. Previously, MSN had imported
results from the Yahoo owned Inktomi database. Of all three major search
engines, MSN is the most “old-school”, relying heavily on on-page
factors to produce ranking results. SEOs learn one of the major tricks to
the MSN search engine is finding ways to drive the new MSNbot spider through
the page as frequently as possible.
The relationship between Google
and Firefox continued to fuel speculation
that a Google branded browser was going to be introduced to the market.
In late January, Google hired Ben Goodger, the lead Firefox developer away
from the Mozilla Foundation and then registered the domain, Gbrowser.com.
While Google and Firefox worked closely together in 2005, a Google branded
browser remains elusive.
At the end of January, Bill
Gates made the single largest private charitable
commitment of all time when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced
a $1.5 billion donation to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations
In the last week of January, Google
released its fourth quarter results
from 2004 showing a 101% increase in revenues over the previous year. The
results marked the first time a search engine had seen billion dollar revenues
in one, three-month period.
Search Engine Market
Share January 2005: (source: Nielsen Net Ratings via
Search Engine Watch)
Google 47%, Yahoo 21.2%, MSN 12.8%, AOL 4.7%, Ask Jeeves 1.8%
February
The head of the Yahoo Media Group, Lloyd
Braun, made waves in early February
with the announcement Yahoo was ramping up its efforts to serve home-entertainment
content via the Internet. Yahoo was not the first search engine to seriously
speak of offering TV and movie files to subscribed users but it was the
first to actually do it. As the year progressed, Yahoo introduced several
TV related features.
Ask Jeeves entered the blogosphere with its purchase of Bloglines. Long
known as the all too quiet fourth in the search engine hierarchy, users
thought the purchase of Bloglines marked a stepping-stone for Jeeves to
get into the PPC market however a paid advertising program from Ask has
not fully materialized. Ask Jeeves also embarked on a major advertising
and promotion campaign with the release of the six thirty-second TV commercials
seen here.
Google had a year of public relations issues, starting with the way they
treated one of their new employees, Mark
Jen. A former Microsoft employee,
Jen was hired in mid-January, only to be fired in mid-February for writing
about work at Google in his personal blog. Topics that got him in hot water
included the Google benefits plan and how Google tries to entice workers
to stay on campus as long as possible by providing essential life-services
such as dentistry, dry-cleaning and state-of-the-art street-hockey equipment.
When Jen wrote, a Google obsessed blogoshpere read, creating a minor conundrum
for Google. One thing blog readers love even more than Google is controversy
and Google created a few months worth by firing Jen.
In February, Google
purchased Answers.com, one of the largest expert-reference
sources on the Internet. It has since incorporated responses from Answers.com
into its search results.
A minor
algo shift marked the first of several Google algorithm updates
in early February. In all, Google’s organic algorithm underwent at
least seven significant updates over the course of 2005.
Towards mid-February, Google was hit with its second
major public relations disaster with the release of the third version of their popular toolbar.
A feature included in the toolbar known as Autolinks was designed to highlight
text found on documents relating to specific topics, referring users to
Google advertisers. For example, if a book’s ISBN number was included
on a web document, that ISBN would be underlined with a link leading to
Amazon.com. The toolbar continues to have Autolinks built in but it is now
disabled by default.
March
March marked the first
decade of search as an application as Yahoo, one
of the original search engines, turned 10. As part of their birthday celebrations,
Yahoo fired a shot across Google’s bow with the introduction of Yahoo
Search Marketing, the paid-search advertising arm of Yahoo. Yahoo Search
Marketing emerged from the combining of various Yahoo properties under one
roof. Previously, Yahoo had run Overture, AltaVista and AlltheWeb as separate
web properties.
The brewing backlash against Google started in earnest in March with webmasters
furious about Autolinks, SEOs angry with Google for violating their own
webmaster guidelines, and Wall St. puzzled by Google’s lack of investor
guidance documents. In a March 7th column for The Street, Kevin Kelleher
blasted Google for its coy silence while Charlene Li of Forrester Research
famously labeled Google a “one trick pony”.
The brewing backlash
against Google is expressed in many creative ways
including the eight-minute film Epic2014.
MSN released the beta version of its paid-advertising
program but limited
the test areas to France and Singapore. MSN is expected to make its paid-ad
program available somewhere around June 2006 when its current deal with
Yahoo expires.
In mid-March, Yahoo made its biggest
acquisition of 2005 when it purchased
Vancouver BC based Flickr, an online photo-sharing package known for its
major feature, social tagging. It also upgraded Yahoo email accounts from
250-megs to 1-gig in competition with Google’s Gmail.
Google made its own interesting
acquisition in March when it purchased
analytics service Urchin in mid-March. “If Google opens Urchin up
for both AdWords and Organic placement advertisers, chances are it will
become a standard tool for measuring and analysing user behaviours, at least
for SEO and SEM practitioners.”
Jeff Raskin, lead developer of Apple’s Grapical User Interface (GUI),
dies at age 63.
April
By far, the biggest
story in April was actually filed fifteen months earlier.
On March 31, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent application
to Google that would redefine the way we understand Google’s algorithms.
The patent, “Information
retrieval based on historical data”,
explains how Google collects and interprets historic data associated with
a document or domain. Today, we believe many ideas expressed in the patent
have been incorporated into the recent Jagger algo update.
The first major click-fraud
class action suit gets underway. “Led
by Texarkana, Arkansas Retailer Lane's Gifts and Collectibles LLC, the plaintiffs
contend that the search engines knowingly charged for fraudulent clicks,
at an average rate of $0.50 per click. The group hopes to have their suit
certified as a class-action lawsuit which would allow other advertisers
to join.”
Google
opened Keyhole, the satellite mapping service they purchased in
2004 to the public by incorporating satellite maps into the Google Maps
feature. Keyhole has since been re-branded Google Earth.
Canadian meta-search engine Mamma.com was placed under SEC
investigation in mid-April. “An informal probe of Canadian search engine company
Mamma.com, by the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has become a formal
investigation according to a press release sent out earlier this week.”
Yahoo released its first quarter results of 2005 showing better than expected
returns of $1.17 billion. Much of the revenue came from paid-search advertising.
A week later, Google
released its first quarter results for 2005. As expected,
they beat expectations with a 93% increase in revenues over the same period
in 2004.
Google releases “My
Search History” feature. “My Search
History will record everything a searcher does while using Google. Users
will note the amount of time they spend on Google, where they went, the
amount of time they spend on each document found through Google, the last
time they visited a web document, and where they went after visiting a web
document.”
The Economist
reported that revenues for Google and Yahoo will likely exceeded
those of the Big-3 US Television Networks; ABC, CBS, and NBC by the end
of 2005.
May
Another round of search
engine algo updates happened with both Google and
Yahoo updating their indexes in the first weeks of May.
The Open Directory Project experienced a great deal of difficulty in
2005 but it suffered its worse period of public perception in May when a
series of
scandals broke.
Barry Diller makes the first of several death threats
against Jeeves, the
jovial butler loved by millions of Ask Jeeves users. Diller has been eyeing
Jeeves for some time now but has not actually canned the character.
Nokia unveiled a handheld Internet
Display Tablet, its first non-phone
mobile device that can access the Internet via WiFi, signalling the first
net-capable mico-device designed for the commercial market.
Search Engine Market Share - May 2005
Google 48%, Yahoo 21.2%, MSN 12.4%, Ask Jeeves 5%, AOL 4.5%
June
Search marketing as a sector continued to receive increasing recognition
as a disruptive
but mainstream advertising channel. A report issued by Safa
Rashtcy a senior analyst at investment bank Piper Jaffray stated search
revenues will increase by a staggering $18 billion by 2010. Search industry
research and analysis firm Outsell issued another report saying the growth
comes at the direct expense of the largest traditional media firms - Reed
Elsevier, Thomson, Gannett, Pearson, Tribune, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, VNU,
Wolters Kluwer, and the Daily Mail and General Trust.
Minor Google
and Yahoo algo updates continue into June.
AOL announces it will broadcast the Live8 concerts.
The minor Google updates turn into a major algorithm change as Google unleashes
what would come to be known as the Bourbon
Update. The entire June 8th newsletter
was devoted to Bourbon.
While the Bourbon Update was underway at one end of the Googleplex, marketing
demons were seen to be working evil at the other end of the campus. In mid
June, Google announced it was going to bundle
its controversial toolbar and desktop search applications into downloads of the popular WinZip application.
Jack Kirby, co-inventor of the microchip dies at age 81.
Google stock soared
past $300 per share in June. It is now trading in the
$440 range.
July
The SEO and SEM community comes together in an amazing show of unity and
concern when UK
SEO Ian Turner went missing for a few days after attending
a Webmasterworld conference in New Orleans. “Last Tuesday, Threadwatch
moderator Nick Wilson posted a frantic missing person report about Ian who
had failed to return to Britain after the WebmasterWorld conference in New
Orleans. Within hours, hundreds of search marketing blogs picked up the
story. By the end of the day, literally thousands of blogs, many of which
are written by people from outside the SEM sector, were carrying the story,
making Ian Turner the most well known name in search, for a short time at
least.”
The most interesting story of July was the case of Dr.
Kai-Fu Lee, part
the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google. Dr. Lee is one of the most
respected computer scientists in the world and is considered a leading expert
on search in the Chinese market. Google hired him away from Microsoft and
that set off a month’s worth of legal fireworks and disclosures of
anger-management issues in Redmond.
James Doohan, the actor who played Scottie on the original Star Trek TV
show died at age 85.
August
The Yahoo Publisher
Network opens to a limited beta test. "Yahoo!
has developed many highly successful relationships with web publishers around
the world, and is building on those experiences to bring new revenue sources
and compelling content to even more high quality sites," said Bill
Demas, senior vice president, Yahoo! Partner Solutions group. "By helping
the broader publishing community maximize the value of their sites, we aim
to create an even more rewarding Internet experience for publishers, advertisers
and users."
Jupiter Media
sold Search Engine Watch, the Search Engine Strategies Shows
and ClickZ Magazine. “Search marketers were surprised yesterday by
the announcement that three of the most influential publications in the
search marketing sector had quietly been sold to new owners. Jupitermedia,
publisher of Search Engine Watch and ClickZ Magazine, announced plans to
sell its research, publishing and trade show divisions to UK-based publisher
Incisive Media PLC for approximately $43million in cash.”
Google introduces
GoogleTalk, their entry into the Instant Messaging service
sector.
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast causing the largest natural disaster
in US history.
September
Google turned
seven. To celebrate, it installs the first phase of what
would come to be known as the Jagger Update.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
blew a gasket when he learned of the pending
defection of .Net guru Marc Luconvsky to Google. “In written testimony
given in the lawsuit Microsoft filed over Dr. Kai-Fu Lee's hiring in June,
Lucovsky stated that Ballmer swore, jumped and threw a chair across the
room upon learning Lucovsky was leaving for Google. Ballmer then started
to rail against Google CEO and long term personal rival Eric Schmidt eventually
questioning Google's long-term existence.”
The Internet
community aids in Katrina relief efforts.
Google hires
Vint Cerf, co-inventor of TCP/IP as "chief Internet evangelist”.
Yahoo announces it has hired
veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites to broadcast
via the web from some of the world’s most brutal war zones. “Using
a backpack and a notebook as his production studio, Sites plans to carry
up to 40lb of computer and satellite gear into conflict zones. He wants
to show the human side of armed conflicts by speaking to the people most
affected by war, innocent civilians. One episode will be based on the destruction
seen by a family in war-ravaged Somalia.”
Industry watchers speculate that Google plans to build an alternative,
private-Internet. “Google is working on its most ambitious project
to date, the creation of a global data transfer network that could effectively
serve as a private Internet.”
Microsoft appoints
Ray Ozzie as executive responsible to bring it all together. “Microsoft
announced it is reorganizing its corporate structure in reaction to competition
posed by Google and Yahoo. A restructured Microsoft will see the merging
of seven business units into three new divisions. It will also see the elevation
of new Microsoft exec. Ray Ozzie to oversee coordination between the Internet
arms of the various divisions.”
Barry Diller continued to make threats
against jovial butler Jeeves.
Google and Yahoo get themselves embroiled in a size war, each ending up
looking like adolescents.
Global Search
Stats from OneStat:
Google 56.9%, Yahoo 21.2%, MSN 8.9%, AOL 3.2%
October
Google and Sun Microsystems announce a distribution
partnership deal between
the two companies. “The news out of the press conference at first
glance seemed simple and anti-climatic. Under the terms of the deal, the
Google Toolbar will be bundled into downloads of the Java Runtime Environment.
Java will be used to power new software developed and released by Google,
effectively endorsing Java and nailing Microsoft's .Net as an emerging development
platform.”
Bloggers around the world unite to try to save
Jeeves. (Thus far, their
efforts have worked)
RustyBrick (aka Barry Schawtz) uses Ask
Jeeves to ask his girlfriend, Yisha,
to become fiancée. The entire search marketing community collectively
sighs.
The search marketing world notices the Google
Jagger Update is well underway. “In
case you haven't noticed, there is a fairly significant update happening
at Google right now. As with all other major updates, Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld has given it a name, Jagger.”
Google Base
is released. “Google is rumoured to be developing a tool
so powerful it could dominate the online auction and classified advertising
sectors. Known as Google
Base , what appears to be the Alpha-phase or first
development stage of the program has been featured on Google focused blogs
for the past 24 hours.”
November
AOL confirms
it is in discussions with other search engines. These discussions
would lead to this week’s major deal that, if accepted by the Time
Warner board will give Google 5% of AOL and shut MSN out of the picture.
Yahoo commences another algorithm update.
The now famous MSN
memos exchanged between Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are
leaked from Microsoft. Part of the Gate’s memo read, “The next
sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to
take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with
our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach
to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our
customers, our partners and ourselves.”
Microsoft releases a beta version of something
called Fremont, which looks
an awful lot like Google Base.
December
The Wall St. Journal announces AOL is about to sign
a deal with Microsoft.
Six days later, the Wall St. Journal reports Google pushed Microsoft out
of the picture. The Time Warner board which meets Tuesday is expected to
ratify the deal with Google.
NYTimes re-launches
About.com. “In the coming months, About.com CEO
Scott Meyer said quality control and monitoring of content is going to be
a high priority, one of five major steps to be taken to relaunch and rebrand
About as an information destination and advertising distributor.”
StepForth Blog
Nominated for SEO Blog of the Year by Search Engine Journal
readers. “Readers of popular search engine news site, Search
Engine Journal , have nominated StepForth News as one of the best SEO focused blogs.
This is the first time our contributions to covering the complicated, interesting,
challenging and often absurd world of search have received such recognition.
It is also a tremendous vote of confidence from our peers, one we are humbly
thankful for.”
As I said in the first paragraph, 2005 has been a long year. We would
like to send special thanks out to our clients, readers, supports and
friends for making 2005 such a good year. Best to all of you and thanks
again.
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