Even though it hardly appears new, the idea of a search engine has only been widely understood for a little over 20 years. Google was founded in 1998, went public in 2004, and the word “google” didn’t enter the lexicon until 2006. Even though Google is currently the most widely used search engine, Archie, which was originally made available on September 10, 1990, actually holds that distinction. Despite how new this technology is, search engines have a rich history of the various things they have made possible and how these things have developed through time.
Pay per click, or PPC, is one of the oldest types of search engine marketing. PPC describes the advertisements that customers encounter on Google when they conduct a product or service search. Businesses use this marketing channel to communicate with customers at the correct time and increase traffic to their websites. Surprisingly, the earliest PPC model in the history of search engines existed before Google. On July 8th, 1996, Planet Oasis introduced the very first flat fee PPC model at a period when Yahoo controlled the search market. Google had just been made public as a research project at this moment.
Two years later, Google entered the market, and PPC had already undergone considerable modifications. Companies could now compete against one another for the best keywords, as opposed to paying a set fee for an advertisement on a search engine. The ads of the highest bidders would appear higher on the page, while the ads of the lowest bidders would appear closer to the bottom of the page. In the history of search engines, this was the first auction-based bidding system. It was first made available by a search engine called GoTo, and it ushered in a brand-new era of aggressive PPC tactics.
In the history of search engines, 1999 is significant because Google began processing more than 500,000 inquiries per day, and by the turn of the century, Google had introduced its own advertising platform, Google Adwords. In 2018, Google Adwords was renamed to Google Ads to more accurately reflect the types of advertisements they work with. At first, Google Adwords was a monthly service that was offered to advertisers, but in 2005, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing Ads added support for manual bidding. This manual bidding procedure gave large businesses the opportunity to undercut their smaller rivals, just as it had in the past. This increased the allure of search engine marketing and significantly aided in its development.
SEM began growing more quickly than conventional types of advertising in 2006, and it continues to do so as new technological developments like the iPhone and iPad made the internet more widely available. The development of mobile technology freed search engine marketing from its dependence on desktop computers and created a whole new range of prospects. The evolution of search patterns influenced SEM as well, giving rise to some of the popular tactics used today, such as geo-targeting and device segmentation. Google introduced Google Smart Bidding to take into account these modifications. Many further bid optimization programmes appeared after.
