The top 5 search engines in 2007 were: wikiseek, Sproose, Wikia Search, Blackle.com, and Google™. Of all the previous mentioned, the only ones still active are Blackle.com, which is an energy saving search engine powered by Google™, and of course Google™ itself.
All these search engines operated based on the 3-step model: web crawling, indexing, and searching; in that order. The results that were provided by these search results were very basic and were simply ranked by page content, usage data, and link citation data. This made it very easy to trick search engines into ranking your site higher if you knew how. They also used the meta keywords tag which became so abused that it is no longer used today.
Since the launch of Facebook and other popular social networks, the way search engines worked had to be changed. Google™, being on the rise and holding most of the market share, knew they had come up with a system that would take those into consideration. This led to the creation of their own page ranking system called PageRank. It consisted of about 22 features that were well beyond the original capacity of traditional search engines. Some of these ranged from synonyms and weather forecasts to time zones and maps. And thus, present day SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born.
By Jason Ellis, Web Developer