The Rise of Google

At this time, new industries that combined search engines and advertising sprung up: search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Both of these jobs are closely tied to the industry. The search engine optimizers (SEOs) market their ability to understand search engine algorithms and “fix” Web sites so that they will appear in the top rankings (the first page or two of a user's search results). Improved Web site rankings obviously mean a greater audience share and the potential to increase profits. Some search engine optimization involves the legitimate tweaking of keywords on the Web page and inserting metatags that will insure that the search engine's crawlers respond.

But the boundary between “optimizing” a page and creating spam has not been very clear. General guidelines claim that it is legitimate to do something to a Web site that helps the page's user and not legitimate to manipulate it in ways that simply bring it traffic. Still, spam manages to influence the search results and, during the periodic adjustments of the algorithm, Web pages get wildly reordered. Legitimate Web sites sometimes get rejected as spam or are sent far down the results list out of the user's immediate view. And the “black hat” (as opposed to “white hat”) manipulators of Web sites have learned how easy it is to create dummy sites with dummy links to the page being “optimized.”

Bloggers have also learned “Google bombing,” creating so many links to a site that it will appear as the first result for a given inquiry. The intent of bloggers is more likely to be humor or a political statement than financial gain, as when they succeeded in making George W. Bush's biography at the official Whitehouse.gov Web site the top ranked result for the search “miserable failure” on three major search engines. The optimizers, spammers, and “bombers” kept the search engines busy adjusting their algorithms as the search engine business became not just big business, but the future of advertising.