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How has website
design changed in the last ten years? What new challenges have
the rise of search engines created?
If you have been following the Internet since its inception,
then you may have noticed that the landscape has changed quite a
bit. The rise of the search engines, in particular, have made
the Internet tremendously more accessible than it ever was
before. The development and improvement of search engines, which
has continued unabated for the past ten years, has in turn led
to a shift in the way that web sites are designed. Whereas the
first web sites were largely designed with the content as the
most important factor, now web sites must be designed with the
knowledge that they need to be friendly to search engines if
they want to attract a large amount of traffic.
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Ten years ago,
the most popular method that Internet users used to find web
sites was through the use of web directories. These web
directories actually had a very similar look and feel to the
modern search engines that dominate the Internet today. If you
were to use a web directory to find the information that you
were looking for, then you might think that you were using a
search engine. However, there were a few fundamental differences
between the old web directories and today's search engines. The
web directories of the past were largely compiled by a team of
humans. If someone had developed a web site, then they would
need to contact the web directory and notify them of their site.
Typically, they would provide a description and a few other
details. Then, the people who worked at the web directory would
review the site and decide whether or not to include it in their
directory. If they decided to include it in their directory,
then they would index it in an appropriate category and they
would index all the content of the site in their directory. One
major advantage of this process was that it kept spammy websites
to a minimum. Since each site had to be manually reviewed, it
was unlikely that a spammy web site could make it through such a
strict filter.
There were quite a few disadvantages, on the other hand,
compared to modern search engines. For one thing, it might take
months for a site to be reviewed. As the Internet gained in
popularity, the backlog of sites waiting to get reviewed became
increasingly large and burdensome. In the second place, the
number of sites and information included in the indices of these
web directories were orders of magnitudes smaller than there are
in modern search engines like Google.
This method was necessary, because the earliest true search
engines were terrible at providing quality results to the
searcher. If a search engine returned results based on the
search phrase, then any spammer could show up as the #1 result
by simply repeating that phrase over and over. It wasn't until
Google pioneered a new way of gauging the quality of sites that
modern search technology really began to take off. One of the
features of Google's search technology is that it would
determine the quality of a web age based on how many incoming
links were directed at the page and from where those links
originated from. They also implemented other measures that
analyzed features that were on the particular web page to
determine whether or not it was a spam page. Their goal was to
develop a general algorithm that could produce good results,
rather than subjecting each page to a manual review.
This has, of course, changed the way that web developers act
when they design new web pages. Now, they need to keep in mind
the search criteria that major search engines like Bing, Yahoo,
and Google use to produce their results. The search algorithms
of these companies are kept secret, and they are constantly
changing. This has made the process of SEO (search engine
optimization) a bit of a cat and mouse game for web developers.
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