Satisfying user intent from off-site search engines or on-site internal search is a crucial way to reach modern-day searchers. Here are some key pointers.
Many of you recall John Battelle's description of Google as "The Database of Intentions" in "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture."
Battelle thought Google was "sitting on a gold mine of information" due to the billions of queries going through its servers. He was right.
But does Google satisfy intention in a query? Perhaps not quite, since we all need better search results, right? New search technologies are launched each year trying to supplant Google. Commercial search has been growing since 1995, back when I was starting my first search engine positioning work on GlobalSafety.com. Best practices in those days were about installing proper meta data and submitting your site to search engines manually. This was before the term "search engine optimization" was coined, and prior to black hat vs. white hat and paid search advertising entering the search marketing landscape.
The history of search in a nutshell
While Tim Burners-Lee invented the internet in 1989, it was merely a collection of servers for information sharing among academics and government in those days. In 1990, Burners-Lee developed the first web browser and called it the World Wide Web. The browser enabled users to locate web pages and view text and graphics on a page. It was the breakthrough that made the web available to a wide audience of home and business computer users, spawning the commercial aspect of the web.
Even though we had the World Wide Web in the early nineties, it didn't truly evolve until more advanced browsers like Netscape Navigator (1994) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (1995) were launched. We all know Internet Explorer became the browser of choice because it was bundled with the Microsoft Operating Systems (Windows 95 and 98). However, AOL and Mozilla may get the last laugh as Firefox gains market share over Internet Explorer.
In the early days, the storing and retrieving of files was done by FTP (File Transfer Protocol), a means for exchanging files over the internet. However, the data was not organized, which made it difficult to find anything. That's when the first search engine, Archie, was born, organizing the files and making them available to users upon a query. Archie answered user queries by searching the FTP sites across the internet, indexing the files and giving users access to its database. As search tools matured, Veronica and Gopher located documents rather than files.
Many search engines and directories were launched between 1994 and 1996, including Yahoo, Open Directory Project (DMOZ), WebCrawler, AltaVista, LookSmart, Lycos, HotBot, Infoseek and Excite. AOL, MSN and Google joined the fray in 1997 and 1998. Besides these major players, there were a number of specialty search engines on the web as well.