` A study of Search Engine Optimisation methods by Gareth Rogan ...

Introduction Gareth Rogan
Chapter 1
Introduction
Background
In the mid 1960’s, at the height of the cold war, a US Military division named the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA) was working on a new type of computer
system. The US department of defence needed to find a way to share information
between different research teams, and provide a system which was capable of continuing
to function in the event of a nuclear strike. This was the origins of the Internet, and it
could not be further from the Internet of today. The functionality which the internet now
provides has far exceeded simply sharing of information between groups. The internet
provides a forum for shopping, social networking, information gathering, as well as a
host of other functions.
With the sheer number of websites offering services to web users, information overload
has become a problem. According to Google engineers, the Google search index hit 1
trillion unique URLs in 2008 [Alpert, Jesse & Hajaj, Nissan (25/7/2008) We knew the
web was big… Google Blog retrieved on the 17 th August 2009 from
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html]. A simple quest to
locate some information could become a mammoth task. Enter the Internet oracle, the
search engine. A search engine is the yellow pages of the internet. It allows an internet
9