Internet Business Guide

OK, its Timberlake lyrics.

Also, it is the way most things work.  There are very few new ideas.  That goes for how we find websites.

In the beginning (way back in 1995) there were hundreds of data jockeys surfing the deep edges of the Internet seeking websites to index.  Most were employed by a little start up in Silicon Valley; named Yahoo!.  Of course, they were not the only company indexing the websites of the Internet into a hierarchical (drill down) structure.

Yes, there were robots, but they were not that smart.  Not being able to distinguish between furniture and furnace as the relevant topic of a website.  Robots back then were used to create a raw list of websites that were reviewed  and indexed by a intelligent human (well, all were human, and most were intelligent).  Yahoo! was the first significant success in creating a search engine.

There were others.  Of note was DMOZ.org.  Unfortunately it became sort of a “black market” to obtain, by payment to a volunteer under the table, search rank.  That’s another story for another time.  The domain name is owned by Time Warner, Inc. Continue reading »