2008: Top Stories in Search
Where oh where has the time gone? With the end of 2008 upon us we can finally sit back and reflect on the past year’s events. Presidential election? Economic crisis? Britney comeback? Nah, we’ll just focus on search news.
Here are some of the top stories in search from 2008:
Want to Trademark “SEO”?
Jason Gambert sure did and needless to say, it didn’t go over well with the search community.Fake News Makes National Headlines
A story was posted on Money.co.uk involving a kid who stole his father’s credit card and used it to purchase hookers. The story blew up and soon it was on the national news. After acquiring about 1500 links it was announced that the story was a hoax. Ethics debates ensued, apologies were made and stories were retracted. However, it certainly made for good entertainment.Google Killer ‘Cuil’ Launches
Launched in July, Cuil was going to index more pages, show page previews and deliver better results. As of today, it doesn’t seem to have made any impact but hey, I guess there is still time.MSN Offers to Buy Yahoo
Back in February Microsoft offered Yahoo $45 billion for the company but Yahoo rejected the offer. Yahoo later came crawling back only to have MSN tell them they were no longer interested. After laying off between 1500-2000 people, maybe they should’ve taken Microsoft up on the offer while they had the chance.Google Gives SEO Advice
In November Google posted a “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” to help people optimize their site. While it is certainly intended as a best practice guide there were some who thought Google should stick to what they do best and others who embraced it.Yahoo Buys IndexTools & Google Analytics Upgrades
To once again compete with Google, Yahoo went ahead and purchased the analytics platform IndexTools in April and pledged to give it away for free. Of course later in the year Google made some major adjustments to Google Analytics and the race continues.Google Launches Chrome & the GPhone
Not happy simply dominating the search engine world Google decided to take a shot elsewhere. Chrome (the browser) was launched in September (beta) and released to the public a few weeks ago, while the GPhone (or T-Mobile G1), which has been speculated about for over a year now was released in late October.SEOMoz Launches Linkscape
SEOMoz launched their backlink checking tool ‘Linkscape’ in October promising access to 38+ billion URLs. The tool received many positive reviews but also created a buzz in the search industry in regards to its ‘crawling tool‘.KoMarketing Begins Monthly Newsletter
Ok, just kidding. Maybe that wasn’t a “big” search news story of the year but it certainly should have been! Or maybe having no heat in the office is finally getting to me!
And so…bon voyage 2008 and we look forward to 2009! Happy New Year!
*Feel free to add in any stories I missed.