Web Traffic

By Peter R Smithson

 My interest in how search engines pick websites and to present them on the internet began in 1999, 12 months after Google was born but before anyone knew about it.


I was working for Ericsson as the general manager of Sony Videoconferencing. I knew the internet was bound to become highly popular and needed to be easier to use. I spend $25,000 of the companies' money building a beautiful looking website called virtual-travel. It was just super. It had pretty good information about the products we had available, but not enough general information. After I completed building the site I was not sure how people were going to find their way to it. After we publicized the launch with some email marketing we had a few visitors for just a few days, but then it dropped off to nothing. I knew what a search engine was, and knew who Google was; we thought it was just another one we were starting to use a little more.

People back then were still not often going to

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