Today is the official six-year anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable. To date, we have written over 10,700 (10,740 to be exact) articles here, and over 1,841 in the past year. But it is not about the quantity of posts, I feel we have always produced unique and useful content, day in and day out here for the past six years. If we couldn't provide unique and helpful content, I doubt I would be keeping this up. And like I always say, the content comes from the community (i.e. the forums), which has always determined what we write about and what I feel is important to highlight to a wider audience.
This article, being my 7,958th article since starting this site (1,754 over past year) will highlight some of what I feel are the most important changes over the course of the year in our industry. If you want to see the same type of post for the 2008 year, see my five year anniversary write up from last year.
I would like to thank all our contributing authors, the volunteer live conference bloggers, our sponsors, the search engines, and of course - you guys - the community. Finally, I would like to thank my wife for putting up with my addiction to search, especially after having our first child.
A quick reminder, if you have not yet subscribed to us via RSS or email, please consider doing so. Also, please consider subscribing to our weekly video recaps and on Twitter at both @seroundtable and @rustybrick.
Enough of that, let's get into the meat of the past year:
On the business front, it has been a pretty wild year. The Yahoo struggles continued over from 2008 to 2009 with Carol Bartz taking over for Yang and Decker. After Bartz killed Yahoo search, she had to be taught that Yahoo was a search company. Yahoo killed many properties this year, including the legendary Geocities. Google also started off the year cutting jobs, but they proved that Google was not all that impacted by this great recession. Jim Safka left Ask.com for personal reasons just a year after replacing Jim Lanzone. Soon later, Ask Japan shut down and Barry Diller began wanting to sell off Ask.com. We end this year with News Corp & Microsoft playing hardball with Google over buying their content. Oh, and let's not forget all the Twitter partnerships this year - a great year for Twitter.
Sometimes search business news and covering minor algorithmic updates bores me a bit. I have been doing this for a long time, so to spice things up, I try to bring in some funny, controversial and inappropriate search related topics into the mix. Possibly the largest controversial story we broke (but didn't get credit for breaking) was a few stories on Michelle Obama. Basically, someone managed to rank a racist image for Michelle Obama in the top image search result. Google then removed the result, which drove some controversy over the unbiased nature of the algorithm. In short, the image returned with an ad from Google explaining why, which is where the story broke into the news. Anyway, the image is now gone again and things have died down on that topic. Michelle Obama's husband also had Google racism to deal with, with a racist iGoogle theme. Then came the Google bomb for Obama with who is the failure query. We also questioned Google's political bias over the course of the elections.
Michael Jackson was big news, when he died suddenly. His fans were upset that he ranked for a query on the "ugliest person in the world." Speaking of Hollywood types of stars, we also discussed how Perez Hilton ranked in Bing, he personally wasn't happy about it. And some popular Indian actress named Rambha, had porn videos of her in Google search results.
Speaking of porn, we had lots of upsetting adult content creep into Google this year. Some of it included a Holocaust video targeted by pornographers in Google. Google's iGoogle gadgets has tons of porn on them as well. The most comical was that parent caught their son Googling for porn and a mother found out her daughter was a porn star using Google history.
Google penalized themselves for buying PageRank, yes - they did. ShoeMoney sued a Google employee and kind of won. Someone else sued Google and first won and then lost. Google was blamed for the web's malware. Google was embarrassed into fixing a Google Groups search bug. There were rumors that a former Googler was spamming. Fake news made its way into Google, including a four letter word.
Other Misc Controversial Topics:
You know what, this will take me days to write everything. I have grouped all the stories I wrote over the year in sections and linked to them below. I hope this is helpful on some level, if not, just skip it - hopefully you read them in the past.
Scams:
SEO:
Search Updates:
Google PageRank Updates:
Google UI & Features:
Yahoo UI & Features:
Bing UI & Features:
Google Webmaster:
Bing Webmaster:
Yahoo Webmaster:
Google AdWords:
Google AdSense:
Yahoo Search Marketing:
Bing adCenter Ads:
Local Search:
Other Search:
Polls:
Industry:
Holiday & Event Logos:
SEM Conference Coverage 2009:
