A Decade in Search – 2008

2008, eh? Well, something must have happened during it, since iCrossing kept paying me. ::surreptitiously consults Google Timeline::

Insofar as a BIG THEME can be detected, (besides the ongoing Yahoo! soap opera), it would be wirelessness. Google began the year by bidding heavily in the US wireless spectrum auction, not to win but to bust the cash threshold that forced open-access rules on to the winner. By freakish coincidence, the Android mobile OS was being demoed by May and launched on the shiny G1 in September.

Google also released this awesome comic strip drawn by the Infinite Canvas guy. It was about a browser or something? I forget.

Meanwhile in the trenches:

As is traditional, around April we all hallucinated an algorithm update, triggering weeks of the usual Beaker-like shrilling in SEO fora around the world. As is also traditional, Matt Cutts denied all knowledge of it, despite inadvertently dubbing it Dewey. The industry also freaked out over a couple of waves of visible PageRank penalisation – apparently aimed in the direction of link sellers. But no, wait – PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore! Phew.

Also, in no particular order:

Googlebot began crawling through certain HTML forms to discover content not conventionally linked to.

Google brought in 10-box results for local blended search, replacing the previous 3-box – because I know *I* just can’t get enough locksmiths in my morning SERP.

Long-tail freaks celebrated as the average number of keywords per search went from 3 to 4.

Redirects and vanity URLs became invalid as AdWords display URLs from April, causing PPC teams to become grouchy and overly attached to certain coffee mugs.

Cuil demonstrated that a dorky misspelled name is necessary but insufficient for online success.