Google Emerges.

1999 - This was the year of the unhappy customer, every potential customer you contacted had either been called that day twice or had been ripped off by some large agency. Business was difficult, Alta Vista was starting to wane a little, MSN and Yahoo were strong and listings were still easy to maintain, Alta Vista, Lycos and Excite had loading times that frequently timed out on 56k modems, the time was ripe for a new approach.

The add URL function was king and software that made automated submissions ran in the office of every web company in the world, submit - submit- submit. In our own office we were paying huge sums of money for ISDN Internet access, we started our reporting software when we left each night and it was still running the next morning when we came in!! To add to that our submission software was also running day in day out.... trouble was on the horizon.

This was also the year that Google broke out of obscurity to the tune of $25million of funding, it had already been making waves and Google was now handling 500,000 queries per day. In those days we never knew about the back link factor in Google's evolution, the investment enabled Google to move to its new location in Palo Alto.

Google started to gain partners, AOL and Netscape then Virgin in the UK, soon Google were on the move, this time to its current location in Mountainview, California. The main players in the search engine world were fighting to control the growing market, paid advertising and banner advertising reigned supreme but they were all too complacent and did not see the coming whirlwind.

Searchers were tired of slow loading times and waiting ages to get search results, Google had found their achilles heel. Webmasters the world over started to recommend Google everywhere they went and in every conversation. Google was great we said, fast search and good results. Every industry forum was filled with positive talk of Google, as was every magazine and every interview made by a webmaster.

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