Paid Search

Engines
By:
John Sharp & Des Laffey,
University of Kent

Presenters
Sarmad Ali
Kamran Ahmed
Husnain Hamid

 Tim Berners-Lee invented WWW in

1990.
ViolaWWW (92), post script.
Cello (92), 1st graphic browser.
Mosaic (93)
Netscape Navigator (94-95)
Excite (93) and Yahoo! (94)

Categorizing Search

Web Crawlers
(Spiders)
1. Visits pages, records
& stores information,
links to other pages.
2. Search Engine
Indexes all links.
3. Search Engine finds
relevancy with query.

Example: Googlebot

 Human Edited Directories

Humans review websites.
Organized into hierarchical categories
e.g. Business, Shopping, News etc.

Emergence of Portals

 Jerry Yang & David Filo,

1994.
they wanted to win Stanford
Fantasy Basketball league.
So they tried to find ways to
get maximum information.
Initially it was a directory
but later on provided Index
results.
The revenue stream was
providing advertisers space.
Diversified their portal.

 Founded in 1985
Fundamentally provided
online services.
AOL had walled garden
approach.
By 2000, it had 23 million
subscribers.
Advertisers paid them to
access this audience.

 Launched in 1995.
Converted from
subscription based dial up
service into an ISP.
Combination of walled
garden & open portal.
Provided search via
Inktomi.
Also provided free email
service by acquiring
Hotmail.

Portal
Rollercoaster
1990s saw a boom in advertisement in US
reaching $8 billion.
Advertisers were desperate to capture
growing online audience.
in 2000s valuations of dot coms were sky
rocketing, but it busted in same year.
Many companies bankrupted.
Advertisers lost faith, portals had to
reorganize.

Search: A Necessary Evil?

Initially portals didnt think of
search as a differentiating
element.
Yahoo, MSN, & AOL were paying
Inktomi to provide search
services until 1999.
But search was a key for users.