Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid result, referred to as natural, organic, or earned results. Let’s take a look at the timeline of search engines. 1994 – The first search engine Altavista was launched. Ask.com started ranking links by popularity. 1995 – Msn.com, Yandex.ru, and Google.com were launched. 2000 – Baidu, a Chinese search engine was launched.