Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
Infoseek did not have the computer power of DEC that Altavista had. They envisioned web searches in the same terms as people asking others when they did not know something. Infoseek would let the internet (SEOs) do the work of determining the best sites by looking at links.
Infoseek Search Engine - (KISS)
Infoseek pioneered using a raw (external) link count to rank web pages. Initially, Infoseek used Yahoo's links as a seed database. The anchor text would tell Infoseek what the page was about ... but they crawled the web looking for links and collecting metadata.
Instead of presenting sites alphabetically, Infoseek's database's natural order was based on the number of links a page or site received, (Many in SEO call these votes). Infoseek used the meta title, description, keywords, and links for keywords. The web-spider would then qualify the keyword's density on the page for keyword relevance.
In simplest SEO terms Yahoo's super fast index can be presented as ...
- Keyword Index file: "Site Name Alphabetically in the file" : "URL-ID"
- Read enough data from the data index to satisfy the query
- Present the list of 10 sites (read the URL-ID database for title and description)
In simplest SEO terms based on the description (not the algorithm) in Infoseek's letter, "Experiences searching the Internet."
- Keyword Index -> Score( Count of keywords in unique links): URL-ID
- Determine the Keyword Density of the URL and add it to the score.
- Get enough results to satisfy the query.
- Sort URLs based on the score - or skip this step, (see note step 2), by Keyword Index -> Score (count of keywords unique links + keyword density)
- Present listing of 10 sites.
Algorithm efficiency
Step 2 can be accomplished when the index is created - so it happens once, not each time somebody does a search.
Step 3 does not need to go to the end of the database, anything beyond result 2000 is not used by Google.
The algorithm literally becomes as efficient as Yahoo's! But using a computer spider to crawl the web instead of human editors.
Google would improve the concept of using links as a ranking factor by inventing PageRank in 1998.
Scalability
At the time, the size of the index only needed to be in the millions of pages.
The infrastructure used -- based on Yahoo's data center with an index for each keyword -- was easy to scale as the search engine used one major factor "links." But, as the internet grew, new pages did not have links and would never be at the top of the results ... the search results became almost static ... except for the efforts of people doing SEO, who aggressively built links.
Infoseek SEO building links / votes?
Link pages, link farms, directories, visitor guest logs, and other linking services appeared to supply the internet with links to help people find new content. Affiliate marketing supplied e-commerce with links.
Link Building
Header, Footer, and sitewide links, (internal and external)
Internal Links Evergreen SEO Best Practices
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