A Decade in Search – 2004

During 2004 search knowledge, tools & business continued to develop. Yahoo! and Google continued to strengthen their hold on the industry fiercely competing against one another. The year saw Google go public, Yahoo dropping Google’s search technology and the development of both search engines products.

From the beginning of 2004 Google’s search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images and by the end of the year its index of web pages reached 8 billion.

Throughout the first half of the year, SEOs focused on developing ‘Florida Theories’ to define Google’s logic to ranking which changed in the tail end of the previous year, and as the year continued debates raged on about the use of trademarks in PPC and SEOs discussed theories on the Google sandbox.

During mid February Yahoo! has ended its relationship with Google, which dated back to October 2002 and started its own search engine technology which was made up with recently acquired search technologies, such as Inktomi and commercial search provider Overture.

In March, Yahoo! launched a new local web search tool called SmartView that uses Yahoo Maps in order to allow users to search for restaurants, theatres, and other places by a single address. In the same month, Google introduced Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps, and directions.

On April the 1st Google launched Gmail, for which at this time, to get an account you needed an invitation. This provoked other email providers to create better offerings to maintain their users.

Shortly after in April the official Google Blog went live, covering news about various products, technologies and initiatives. Yahoo released their search blog later in the year, in August where they blog news and insight on all things search.

Also in April, Google filed for public stock offering and after a few months of buzz about internet stocks as Google’s company finances were released, the company finally went public on August 18th 2004.

To end the year, during December Google began to test the use of images within its web search results, by displaying related imaged to the search query.