SEO Like It's 1999

As I was sitting in my office this morning, I glanced over at my bookshelf. On a whim, I picked up my old college marketing textbook, Contemporary Marketing by Boone & Kurtz (1999).

I intended to look up "search engine optimization" in the glossary and see how things have changed. The term was not even listed.

So I looked for "website" or "websites"...again, nothing in the glossary.

I did find a reference to "search engines", and quickly turned to the respective page. The information presented on search engines was in a chapter titled Marketing Research and Decision Support Systems, and was buried in a graphic titled "Online Sources of Secondary Data". Below is the 740 page marketing textbook's reference to search engines in it's entirety:

Search Engines

These search engines can help track down online information on a variety of topics:

• Search.com (http://www.search.com) - This site gives access to over 300 specialized indexes and search engines.
• Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) - This tool submits your query to nine of the top search engines at once.
• Altavista (http://altavista.digital.com) - This service provides one of the largest search indexes on the web.
• Infoseek Guide (http://www.infoseek.com) - This search index includes millions of listings.
• Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) - This useful search index divides reference sites into logical groups.

So there you have it - everything a marketer needed to know about search engines in 1999!

A couple of questions come to mind:

• Do you notice any big names missing from the list above?
• What (and who) do you think we'll be talking about in 2019?