In the late nineties, the first search engines were referring to the keywords inserted by the creators of websites within their pages through the META tag. IIn an ideal world, this approach would have been quite functional, but soon began to webmaster smarter in their pages for dozens of keywords, in fact, nothing makes the usefulness of this tool (provided, however, in the same specification as HTML) .

Simultaneously, the popular search engines (one of the most used at the time was Altavista) began to sell high positions in their search results, mixing in the presentation of results both sites "deserving", that meet the search criteria user, both clients sites that had paid the search engine to being found by users in the first pages of response.

This situation is certainly not clear, prepared the ground for the advent of Google.