Answer Engine Optimization

Chapter 1. The Death of 10 Blue Links

It’s April 1997.

You just got home from school, fired up your Compaq Presario (the one with the brand-new Pentium MMX), and waited as your dial-up modem screeched its way onto the information superhighway. This wasn’t just another random internet session. This time, you were on a mission. You had a specific, kind of urgent question in mind: Will Ross and Rachel get back together? And you did what everyone did. You opened Netscape Navigator and typed your query into AltaVista or Lycos. A few seconds later, 10 results came back. None of them actually answered the question. They just pointed you toward 10 more places to look.

But then you remembered a TV ad with a quirky British butler, so you jumped over to Askjeeves.com, a web-based “answer engine” of sorts that used human editors and a natural language matching system to pair an extensive Q&A database with each search query and return answers most closely related to what users were asking.

Ask Jeeves had just launched with a proposition so audacious it seemed almost naive: you could ask questions in plain English, and the system would give you an answer. Not a list of links. Not a directory. An actual answer. Within its first year, Ask Jeeves was handling more than 1.5 million queries per day. By 1999, it would field over 7 million. People loved it because it did what search engines at the time couldn’t. It tried to understand what you were asking and respond accordingly. It wasn’t perfect, ...