Thirty years ago, I published my first guide to search engines called The Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines. For the anniversary, I dug up the old HTML files from my archives, dusted them off, and have made them available for anyone interested in what the search engine landscape was like back then.
I’ve made some very slight changes to the original docs, mainly to help the guide be more readable (and less frustrating) for current audiences. Many of the links no longer worked, for example — sorry all of you who were still hoping to use Infoseek’s Add URL page! I’ve kept the original URLs as text in some places and tried to link to similar resources in others. I also dropped a few pages that no longer make sense, such as my mailing list sign-up page.
How the guide came to be
I’ve written before about the origin of the guide, so I won’t repeat a lot of that here. In short, I worked for a company at the time called Maximized Online (proud division of Maximized Software, hey, Ken!). We had a client complaining he wasn’t ranking well in search engines. We’d done the submissions. We’d done the meta tags. I didn’t know much more to say beyond that, because there really wasn’t a lot of research or knowledge about how search engines worked.
So I studied them. I looked at how search engines came to one of our sites over a four-month period. I watched how they reacted when I made changes based on what seemed to be important ranking factors. Then I published what I learned as tips to help others.
I also devoted a lot of effort into defining what I considered to be the important search engines. At the time, there were many search engines and human-powered directories. It was time consuming submitting to them all, especially the directories. Understanding the ones among the many that mattered was important.
A guide about SEO that didn’t say SEO
Going back through my archives, it was interesting to find that I didn’t use “SEO” or “search engine optimization” in the initial guide. I did use “optimization” on the home page a few months later in July 1996:
I used “search engine optimization” in full for the first time in a meta tag in August 1997, a year later. Wow! Even more suprising: despite this, I’d settled on “search engine design” from May 1997, then started using “search engine positioning” in October 1997, until finally adopting “search engine optimization” in September 1998.
(I’ve now used the term “search engine optimization” so often that I’ve probably triggered the spam filters on Lycos of 1998. Kids, Lycos was a search engine like AltaVista, which was a search engine like Open Text, which was a search engine like….).
Clearly, I didn’t coin the term “SEO” — glad I never said that I did! See here for who does claim doing that back in 1995.
Evolution of the guide
A few months after I initially published the guide, Maximized Online closed, so that the parent company could focus on software development. I became a consultant, mostly doing SEO projects. I also went back to my roots as a journalist, doing freelance writing about search engines and also maintaining and expanding the guide for myself.
That included running a newsletter and starting a subscription service for some content in the guide (and thank you for the help with this, Rob, Michelle, Steve and FrontPage). This was years before Substack, Ghost, WordPress, and other services existed—platforms I’m so glad make self-publishing so much easier for people today
By November 1996, the guide had a major rebrand to “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines” because changing from “The” to “A” moved it toward the very top of Yahoo’s alphabetized web promotions category list (or wherever it was listed; I can’t recall now). Oh, the days of directories and alphabetized lists!
In July 1997, I greatly expanded and relaunched the guide as Search Engine Watch (as shown above; see here for more history about that). I later went on to launch Search Engine Land in 2006, which I ran until retiring in 2017. Over 21 years writing about search engines, something I never would have expected to come from the initial guide. Nor, that after retiring, I’d end up getting to see search from the inside by working at Google — which didn’t even exist when I wrote my first guide (Counting Clicks and Looking at Links, from August 1998, is the first time I wrote about Google).
At least one of my motivations to retire, to never have to write about meta tags again finally came true. Briefly. At some point, I helped contribute to some updates of Google’s page. Well, at least it was only about meta description tags.