10 big changes with search engines over my 20 years of covering them

Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan looks at how search has changed over the two decades he's been writing about it.

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search-20-years-chalkboard-ss-1920Today is my 20th anniversary of covering search and search engines. To mark the occasion, I wanted to reflect on some of the big changes that I’ve seen over the past two decades of covering the space.

1. The search revolution

Chances are, the first resource you turn to if you have a question about something is a search engine, whether it be Google, Siri, Bing, Yelp, others or a combination of services.

This simple act that you likely don’t think twice about was a highly revolutionary change to how people sought information. Before popular consumer-focused search engines emerged just over 20 years ago, people got answers the same way they had for hundreds and thousands of years: largely by asking other people.

If you needed an answer, you turned to people like a teacher, a professional, a best friend or a librarian. Sure, there were also tools to use: libraries, library catalogs, Yellow Pages and professional databases like LexisNexis. But for most people, getting an answer to many questions meant asking others.

Enter search engines, our new best friends that seemed to have an answer for anything we needed. They revolutionized how we gather information in the way the smartphone changed how we communicate — yet, unlike the smartphone, search has been a quiet revolution. Perhaps it seemed so natural that we didn’t think to be in awe of the profound change it delivered.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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