What did we do before Google? Maybe it’s just marketing nerds like the team at Hiilite that seems to ask this question. However, if you’ve ever wondered, “what was it like performing online research before Google?”, this post is for you.
You may think that search engines are a (relatively) new concept – Google was founded in 1998 after all. The truth is, search engines and search engine optimization (SEO), has been in practice for a very long time. It has just been shifted from an offline format to online – thus cutting the time it takes to get results exponentially.
Years ago, you’d have to sift through multiple business listings in the phone book to get information on a business, their rates and services they provide. Now, you can pre-qualify a company in just a few seconds with a very pointed search query. Whereas previously you could ‘game’ the system in a phone book by calling your company A1 Adelaide Plumbers (thus appearing at the top of the directory for plumbers in your locale), similar practices have been made available online to improve your search engine presence – known as search engine optimization (SEO).
What did people do before Google?
We relied on the knowledge of librarians, educators and experts within their respective fields. If we didn’t have a suitable person within our network, we sought out answers in our own experiences. Let that sink in, when someone wondered “what is the capital of France?” You had to venture out to your local library, Geography teacher or perhaps your friend from France to get the answer. Isn’t that wild to think about? Performing research before Google was online makes you really appreciate the infrastructure we have in place now.
Who Created Google?
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.
How Was Google Created?
Essentially, the owners had a theory that webpages who had backlinks from other, highly relevant, authoritative websites are likely to be the most relevant for those searching for related topics. Studies were then carried out to test this theory. Obviously, based on the success of Google, you may have guessed, their findings proved their theories correct.
To those that have a background in online marketing or search engines in general, you already know that this theory is still a large foundation of how search engine algorithims operate. For instance, Moz has reported that domain-level links and page-level links have 8.22/10 and 8.19/10 correlation in search engine ranking respectively. These metrics rank #1 and #2 in their ranking factors.
Why Was Google Created?
The same reason any product/service exists, to fill gaps in the marketplace! When the internet was in its infancy stages, browsing the web without knowing the exact URL was difficult, time consuming and (potentially) costly.
Google was created to crawl and act as the primary index source for the internet, organizing them by what it feels was the most relevant to a searcher.
