The Complete History of Search Engines & Making Money Online

The first web directories and crawlers appear. Jerry Yang and David Filo build Yahoo as a human-edited guide to the web.

Digital Equipment Corporation launches AltaVista — the first search engine to index the full text of the web. Handles 300,000 queries on day one.

Natural language search arrives. Amazon launches the first major affiliate program, paying commissions on book sales.

Bill Gross unveils the PPC model at TED. Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google. ClickBank and Commission Junction launch.

Google launches AdWords with 350 advertisers. The dot-com crash wipes out Excite, AltaVista, and dozens of early portals.

Overture powers paid search for Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. The toolbar economy begins as Ask Jeeves distributes its toolbar with free software.

AdSense creates the content site economy. Yahoo acquires Overture for $1.63B. The golden age of MFA (Made for AdSense) sites begins.

Barry Diller's IAC takes over Ask Jeeves. Google introduces Quality Score, reshaping how AdWords auctions work.

Ask Jeeves drops the butler and becomes Ask.com. Microsoft launches adCenter (later Bing Ads) to compete with AdWords.

CPCs begin declining as more publishers join AdSense. Google tightens quality policies. The MFA site model starts to collapse.

Panda targets thin content and MFA sites. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publishers lose 50–90% of their traffic overnight.

Penguin targets manipulative link building. The SEO industry is forced to adapt. Toolbar bundling practices come under FTC scrutiny.

Google prioritizes mobile. AdWords evolves into Google Ads. The affiliate marketing industry shifts to social media and content marketing.

Google introduces AI Overviews, threatening organic traffic. Webmasters again scramble to adapt. The cycle continues.