2009 has been an epic year in SOE.  We have seen the launch of new search engines, and massive changes to the way in which Google have ranked websites.  More and more businesses around the world have embraced search engine optification to the point where online businesses are now competing with dozens of different websites every day.  In what could over time become a tradition, we look back over 2009 – the year in SOE to see what the key happenings were each month.

January

Google Cyril Update – A massive emphasis shift in the ranking algorithm added +2 Strength and +3 Skill to Websites that incorporated strong latency within their semantic distribution space, while simultaneously penalising websites with -2 health and -1 luck if they contained keyword density vectors of less than 18.25%.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

February

Dogpile Meta Issues – Dozens of websites in the popular Dogpile Search Engine lost rankings overnight when the search giant amended its algorithm to reduce the value of the Meta Author tag.  Black Tuesday saw more than seventeen previously successful websites disappear entirely.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

March

Google Derek Update – Building on the huge changes of Cyril, Derek was a further refinement of the new ranking algorithm that factored a +1 luck modifier into websites that incorporated green text into their home page.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

April

Google Edward Update – Websites that included intent eigenvectors within their social engagement curvature were enriched with a +2 modifier to all attack variables across entry pages optimised for the term “cost effective” rather than cheap.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

May

Bing Launched – Technology start-up Micro-Soft launched a new internet called Bing.  Sites incorporating Siverlight and ASP saw a boost in traffic as the Binglebot crawled all 5,000 websites in the world in less than 10 minutes.

Google Frank Update – Google’s response to the launch of Bing was predictable.  The company provided a boost to all 200 websites that incorporated the rel=”nobing” attribution in their link architecture.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

June

The engineering department at Googleplex were on holiday this month, which meant that no new websites were made.  To capitalise on the lack of activity from the Googler, Bingle engineers released the first update to their searcher – Codenamed Aaron, it added a +3.4 modifier to all defensive rolls for websites that included the rel=”weluvbill” attribute on every image.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

July

It was Bing’s turn for a holiday in July, so Google unleashed the Gordon update.  Any website that blocked Bingle from crawling it got a +5 rankings boost, and Google also introduced full support for the Meta Ranking tag, making it the first search engine to incorporate a Dutch auction model for rankings.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

August

Bing announced that it was planning to take over Yahoo – a staggering level of growth in such a short time – in response, Google launched a secret bid to buy the Internet, although this failed when the company could not meet the £250,000 asking price for the computer where the Internet is hosted.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

September

Google Horace Update – Google gave all websites with green h1 tags an extra PageRank, which made a big difference to rankings.  Some websitemasters boasted of getting up to a hundred extra visitors as a result.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

October

Google Chocolate Update – Although described as a change to the Googler infrastructure rather than a ranking update, many webmasters claimed that the new results unfairly punished them with a -2 luck modifier on attacking pages and a -3 strength change on pages with an expressed defensive eigenvector held in the top 4 lines of code.  Google Engineers suggested that this was merely an echo of a previous update being expressed in the code.  Nonetheless, the search company quietly retired chocolate a week later.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

November

Google Idris Update – A major upgrade to the Googler’s intelligence circuits resulted in websites with pictures on them becoming more of a force in the internet world.  SOE professionals quickly discovered that a single pixel image that had the main keyword as its alt text would practically guarantee a ranking between position one and fifty due to a +3.2 strength update to PageRank for websites with relevant images.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

December

Google Joshua Update – An all new Googler was released as part of the Joshua Update in December.  This new version was able to simultaneously handle seven enquiries at once, and also provide updates via the popular micro-blogging service Jaiku.

The Launch of Blekko was postponed for one month pending refinements, although additional funding was secured.

Search Casualties

Increased competition in search saw a number of high profile search engines die on the vine over the course of the year in 2009.  Some of the most notable engines that will not see 2010 were as follows:

• Searchbot.com
• Searchfunk.com
• Directorysearch.com
• Usearchwesearchallsearch.com
• Doasearchnow.com
• Pleasesearch.com
• Betterthangoogle.com
• Greatinternetsearchengine.com
• Cuill.com

Search Engine Goals for 2010

Having spoken to our contacts within the highly secretive web site relevancy and ranking teams at the major search engines, we received the following tip-offs about what is happening next year:

Dogpile.com

We plan to double the size of our index to provide greater relevancy to both our users – watch this space.

Lycos.com

We plan to treble the size of our index to provide greater relevancy to both our users – watch this space.

Infoseek.com

We plan to quadruple the size of our index to provide greater relevancy to both our users – watch this space.

Ask.com

We plan to retire the Jeeves mascot and introduce a new character and unique marketing plan – watch this space.

Blekko

We plan to launch a genuine competitor to Google next month, and we have secured additional funding.

Bing

We plan to exponentially increase the size of our index to provide greater relevancy to both our users – watch this space.

Google

We plan to infinitely increase the size of our index to provide greater relevancy to our users – watch this space.

Quote of the year

Larry Page to Bill Gates on the subject of Bing:

“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”

Our Prediction for 2010

The Googler Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 2010. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. The Googler begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th.