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The Year in Search 2006

Dec 28, 2006
by

Chris Winfield from 10e20 published a post with the name
“101 Biggest Stories in Search 2006” or “The Year in Search 2006″.

Now this is not a cheesy attempt to get dugg to the homepage of digg. It is actually quite interesting. Quite a lot of stuff happened this year. The biggest chunk of all events revolve around Google and its activities of course, but only
2 1/3 of the top 5 stories are not about Google and do not reflect the overall percentage of Google stories in the top 101. That number must be around 75% or so.

Okay, the no.1 story was Google related, Google’s acquisition of YouTube for a staggering 1.65 Billion Dollars, which was quite a surprise for everybody in the industry.

The price tag was certainly not paid for YouTubes remarkable technology or because they make tons of money, but to secure a large chunk of market share in the exploding adaptation and usage of video.

At least did they deny their competitors that share, which is in some case already by itself worth an investment.

The no.2 Story was the announcement of Danny Sullivan, a (if not “the”) Search Engine Marketing Veteran, that he would leave SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the most important Search Marketing related news site, resource and forums for years.

Danny founded SearchEngineWatch in 1996 and sold it in 1997. He remained Chief Editor under the new and changing owners over the years. His leave and the fact that he took virtually the complete SEW Editor and Writer staff with him caused a major blow to Incisive Media, the current owner of SEW and other eMarketing properties such as the CLickZ Network and the Industry Conference SES – Search Engine Strategies.

He launched just a few weeks ago his new Search Marketing News Site called Search Engine Land and in June next year will his new tradeshow SMX – Search Marketing Expo have its debut.

No.3 is the Social Media Optimization and all its side effects which are covered by Bloggers extensively.

No.4 is the “BigDaddy” Infrastructure Update of Google that was causing more pain than their infamous Florida Update on November 16th 2003.

No.5 is the announcement of the big three search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that they will support a Universal Sitemaps Standard

The other 96 stories are also interesting read. Go and check it out.

About Carsten Cumbrowski

Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger. To learn more about me and what I am doing, visit my website and check out the “about” section.

Twitter: ccumbrowski
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
  • http://www.10e20.com Chris Winfield

    Carsten –

    Excellent summary of the top 5! Any stories that you felt were not included that should have been?

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com carsten cumbrowski

    Thanks Chris,

    Good Wrap up on your part too. Must have been a lot of work. I am still working on my "the year in review" post which will not even cover as much as yours did.

    Anyway. For the affiliate marketing world was the Danny thing not a big deal. Also the Sitemaps announcement not.

    The Google Landing Page or Quality Score was one of the biggest stories, Googtube of course, the BigDaddy update and I would say the Panama release, but the impact of that one will be felt next year.

    Other topics are not search marketing related or can not be nailed down to a "story". The increase of Advertiser awareness of Search Marketing maybe. That is a trend that goes on for over a year now though. The problem is that Advertisers started enforcing new rules which did not make much sense and is often the result of "half-knowledge" of the topic. I wrote multiple LONG posts about that this summer.

    CPA Networks threat to classic affiliate networks was big. PayPerPost and then the FTC thing.

    No, I think you covered pretty much everything important. You could argue about the ranking of some but that is not surprising.

    Cheers,
    Carsten

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com carsten cumbrowski

    Actually, one thing did fell a bit short in your post. Google checkout and the problem with affiliate tracking and also third party conversion trackers for PPC.

  • http://www.10e20.com Chris Winfield

    Great points Carsten – I look forward to your recap. There were definitely a bunch that got left off and perhaps some that shouldn't be there (spammer fine for example) but I just wanted to get a good flavor for the year and the things that defined it —without having TOO many Google stories ;)

    Thanks again for the feedback – excellent points

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com carsten cumbrowski

    Hi Chris,
    my recap will be somewhat personal in nature, because it was a very turbulent year for me. I also use it to demonstrate some of the positive aspects of social media and some IMO interesting cause and effect chains :)