This is the second post in the ‘decade in search’ series. We’ll probbaly see a whole host of predictions being made for 2010, but before making ours we thought we’d the take time to review the major events that have shaped the search industry over the last 10 years.
2001 was a hugely successful year for Google, despite the dot-com bust of the time. Eric Schmidt was appointed as the chairman in March, the man who would later announce for the very first time that Google was profitable. In the cautious world following the dot-com bust, Wall Street analysts valued the company at $250 million. In other search news:
- A watchdog group filed a petition with the Federal Trade Commission arguing that eight major search engines, including Altavista, Direct Hit, Lycos and Microsoft, violated the truth-in-advertising rules by not having clear disclosure that some of the listings were paid for.
- Google pushes to improve its service by indexing and returning PDFs, the first search engine to do so.
- Altavista mentioned that it had patented the ability to crawl and index the web. It’s CEO of the parent company, David Wetherell said “We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents”. The statement was not received well.
- Lycos cuts down on staff after seeing a significant revenue drop, as well as losing some of its top management team.
- Timothy Koogle steps aside as the Chief Executive of Yahoo, which leads to falling shares for the largest Internet company that made its money through advertising.
- Yahoo partners with Overture to display paid for listings next to its natural listings.
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