Danny Sullivan Decade Of Search Engines

A Decade Of Writing About Search Engines by Danny Sullivan When it comes to the internet, there are a lot of firsts. It's indisputable that Danny Sullivan was the first to write consistently about the search industry and he reviews his pick of the top stories over the past eight years (with two more years referenced without links) in a nearly 150 point list with links to his original stories. He twice apologizes for the incomplete nature of his story picks.

As a much less frequent and prolific writer on search, I considered doing a similar recap of my own, but I find that my interests vary dramatically from traditional media - and Danny Sullivan. I find the day to day developments in the search industry to be nothing short of mind numbingly uninteresting and find that I'm entirely unable to force myself to pay attention to things that have little to no effect on my clients and their search ranking.

Commentary on stuff that reaches into search referrals and how to improve visibility will always gain my attention. So I applaud Danny Sullivan for looking at the minutia of search for ten years and focusing our attention on the things that really matter - even when it was dull.

Interestingly, I couldn't even bring myself to go to any of the over 140 links that Sullivan posted to search milestones in his blog entry. They're over, done, finished, history - and that is how I see much of what makes news in search. Sullivans links to search engine mergers and acquisitions stories and to the Google IPO story seem like a great resource to cover this aspect of the history of the web and that's the biggest reason to pay attention to it.

I prefer looking at things that others tend to ignore, because they have more of an impact on my clients and how they rank. I've been on and on for years about how referred search engine traffic matters far more than anything. I talk about spammers and cheaters a fair amount.

But looking at what interests me by reviewing my blog entries is informative of my thought process. I write about things when they make discussion forums and discussion lists and blogs.

I find that if clients ask questions or refuse my advice, I'll blog about that as well. This seems what blogs are about to me - a place to comment on industry issues of interest. I'll avoid discussing those things that bore me because I assume that they bore everyone else. ;-)

But congrats to Danny Sullivan on ten years of covering the search world.