Search Engine Watch began with a complaining client of mine, back at the end of 1995. He kept grumbling that he couldn't find his site in WebCrawler, and he wanted to know why. I didn't have any good answers for him, a situation I don't like. Like many web designers and developers, I assumed that you created a site, submitted it to the search engines, and eventually all your pages would be listed. Why a site might come up first for search terms was a mystery. Some people were saying it all had to do with Meta tags, but there was nothing definitive to guide web developers.
I undertook a study to get the answers I wanted. I made changes to one of the sites I maintained and tracked how it performed over the course of three months in the major search engines. By the end, I'd learned a lot. I learned more than just things to do to help a web page. I'd come to understand that not all the search engines worked the same. In fact, I discovered that for many reasons, they might not index web pages at all.
The web is about sharing information, so I placed the results of my study online. But coming from a journalism background, I also compiled a comprehensive chart of major search engine features. I also created an alliance chart, so that I could determine which search engines were worth worrying about, from a traffic point of view. This was the first time information of this type was available to web designers, way before the many "search engine secrets" guides that have now seemed to have sprung up.