Every day, internet gossip boards and glossy magazines are full of rumours about paternity. Leaving Prince Harry aside for a moment, the biggest paternity kerfuffle of recent times is actually NOT being disputed by any of the alleged fathers, but rather by bloggers, journalists and pundits around the world. Who is the “father of the internet”?

Well, Robert Kahn co-invented the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, which allow systems to send sizeable chunks of information to each other. This is absolutely central to the idea of a “web” of computers working together. First registered in 1974, the protocol is still used extensively on the internet today, for email, web browsing and FTP. Vint Cerf is now Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” and, along with Kahn, was responsible for TCP/IP. Both of these two are pretty strong candidates for the title “father of the internet”.

As an interesting sidenote, the IP system that we use at the moment only allows for 4.2 billion IP addresses. With the huge growth in the number of internet users, we are running out of IP addresses. Cerf is leading the charge to switch to a new Internet Protocol (IPv6) which should be commonly adopted in the next two years.

Before Kahn and Cerf, there was Paul Baran, who developed packet-switched networks. Packet Switching allows information to be sent in small chunks, without the need for a dedicated route to be predetermined (absoutely central to the internet we know today). The technology was applied to the US Military’s ARPANET, which is acknowledged as the precursor to the modern internet. Baran’s work laid the foundation for the TCP/IP protocols.

Being a UK SEO company, we have to mention Sir Tim Berners Lee. The World Wide Web that we are familiar with was largely shaped by his vision. The actual physical internet was in place long before Berners Lee applied the idea of hypertext transfer across the network, but the web that we know and use every day is his. Before Berners Lee, the internet had been used for the transfer of data from one computer to others, with none of the “cyberspace” we know today. His innovation lead to websites, URLs and HTML.

Are we missing anyone out? Almost certainly! This is a complicated paternity case indeed.

…and back to the photo with the dodgy pudding bowl! This appeared in today’s Argus (the local paid daily paper).

Despite a German team winning the UEFA Champions League, 2001 was a pretty good year. Whilst the 4th of September of that year was important for Google, in that they were awarded their patent for the PageRank search algorithm, there’s another reason why this year is currently notable for the search giants.

In celebration of 10 years of Googling, Google have resuscitated their oldest search archives and have set up a celebratory way-back-when search page which takes you back to January 2001. Results are converted into archive.org indexed pages, allowing you not only to see the search results from that time but also see most of the sites behind those results, along with images.

A search for ‘YouTube’ gives no results. Googling ‘iPod’ gives the “Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System” as its #1 result, and while there are many “facebooks”, there is no ‘Facebook’. Halcyon days. Interestingly, a search for ‘top search engine’ gives Lycos as the top result (does anybody still use Lycos?).

As, uh, “search enthusiasts”, this is a pretty interesting little widget from Google, and shows us (if not through the complexity of the algorithm, then by that rather ugly 2001 logo) just how far they’ve come.

It’s every SEO’s second favourite time of the year again: Google PageRank update time.

Some people in the Search Engine Optimisation industry obsess over PageRank. At Upstream Connections SEO Company, we take a more pragmatic approach to the subject. It is quite common for a page with a lower PageRank to come above a higher PR site in Google’s listings. Links from higher PR sites are generally of more value than links from lower PR sites but again, this should not be something to obsess over.

If you have have seen a shift in your PageRank in the last week, don’t panic as this is unlikely to affect you at all. If you would like any more details about the update, get in touch with us.

What is every SEO’s favourite time of the year? That’s the Algorithm adjustment.*

*Really, we like it - none of our clients has ever been negatively affected by the adjustments.