Search Advisory   Brought to you by Prominent Placement, Inc., provider of search engine optimization services and pay-per-click advertising

Love this graphic showing the The History of Search!  I didn’t know this was going on during the first year listed (1994), as I was still working in traditional advertising then (plus waddling around being pregnant…um, yeah, she’s driving now).

But so much of this is so familiar…explaining the difference between directories and search engines…running ranking reports on 20 different search engines (don’t forget AltaVista, HotBot, Inktomi, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler, Dogpile and Northern Lights!)…focusing only on rankings (that’s all we could measure!)…hearing this concept from GoTo.com that companies would PAY for a searcher to click on an ad – what a nutty idea!…going through contortions to get sites added to the Open Directory Project (dmoz)…

Ah, good times!  In some ways, those truly were the “good old days” because search marketing was more straightforward, and it was so much easier to get results than it is today.  Now we have billions more web pages to compete against, and countless other SEM experts battling it out for rankings, traffic, and conversions.

But I do enjoy how this industry has evolved to focus on what really matters in terms of customer interactions and retention, leads, sales, and ROI.  I can’t imagine what the next 15-16 years will look like!

Infographic by the PPC Blog.com

Thanks to Mark Sink for bringing this to my attention.