The Savvy Marketplace

There are many ways to learn about search engine optimization. In the early days the first people in the industry had to learn things for themselves. Search engines were simpler then and it often did not take much to figure out how to move a Web page to the top of targeted search results. But two search engines changed all that: Inktomi and Google. You may not have heard about Inktomi but you have surely heard about Google by now.

Inktomi no longer exists but in the 1990s its engineers developed search technology that was licensed by many other search engines. Inktomi was known as the search engine behind the search engines. You could not directly search Inktomi’s database or submit a site to it. You had to use one of their customers. At one time more than 30 popular search engines used Inktomi’s databases.

Google came along in 1998 and within a few years had overtaken Inktomi as the most influential search engine on the Web. Both Inktomi and Google used links to influence their search results. Inktomi was believed to use raw counts of links pointing to Web pages to determine which pages should appear in its public search results. Google introduced the idea of PageRank (named for Google co-founder Larry Page), which holds that links are only as important as the documents that contain them.

Although Larry Page’s ranking ideas have been proven wrong, Google has risen to become the most popular search engine today. Now many people try to analyze how Google works and influence its search results. The SEO Theory blog is one of the leading sources of information on search engine algorithms. You can also read about SEO theory on Best SEO Blog and Twitter.

Although many SEO experts write about search engine optimization, there are few blogs that attempt to explain the theory behind search engine interaction with the Web. The SEO Theory blog helps you learn more about the basic principles and forces that drive the Web every day.