Back to the Beginning

SEO has been around ever since the first search engine searched for the first computer file. Surprisingly, Google and Yahoo! were not the first search engines; Gerard Salton, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, beat them by nearly a half-century. His search engine, and the use of Hypertext (see the following), were actually developed in 1965 to locate and retrieve files from the earliest computers.

Hypertext and the 1960s

In 1960, Ted Nelson developed Project Xanadu.1 He coined the term hypertext in 1963 from hyper (meaning motion) and text meaning . . . well, text. This moving text then led to the development of the term HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)—which are the first four characters of every web page address; and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which is the language used today to create web pages. And of course, WWW stands for “World Wide Web.”

Here’s an example of how a typical web address would read if spelled out completely:

Enter the Military and ARPAnet

Salton’s and Nelson’s work eventually led to the 1972 creation of ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the predecessor to today’s Internet. The very first official search engine emerged in 1990. It was called Archie—from the word ARCHIvE—and was created by McGill University student Alan Emtage in Montreal, Canada. ...

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