Chapter 1. You: Programmer and Search Engine Marketer

Googling for information on the World Wide Web is such a common activity these days that it is hard to imagine that just a few years ago this verb did not even exist. Search engines are now an integral part of our lifestyle, but this was not always the case. Historically, systems for finding information were driven by data organization and classification performed by humans. Such systems are not entirely obsolete — libraries still keep their books ordered by categories, author names, and so forth. Yahoo! itself started as a manually maintained directory of web sites, organized into categories. Those were the good old days.

Today, the data of the World Wide Web is enormous and rapidly changing; it cannot be confined in the rigid structure of the library. The format of the information is extremely varied, and the individual bits of data — coming from blogs, articles, web services of all kinds, picture galleries, and so on — form an almost infinitely complex virtual organism. In this environment, making information findable necessitates something more than the traditional structures of data organization or classification.