It's time to take a look at that article and grand predictions I made for search industry to determine whether I'm a "Nostradamus" or a "NoSuchLuckus".

Here were my personal predictions for 2002:

1. Increase in Pay For Performance (PFP) Options

My first prediction for year 2002 related to pay for performance options: "I see this trend increasing, with major engines and directories expanding on range of PFP options they provide, whether in-house or outsourced".

Looks like I was right on money with this one. By end of 2002, all but one of major search engines and directories had a pay for performance option available. Paid inclusion services in particular proved to be a popular addition to search engines in 2002, with Lycos, FAST / AllTheWeb and Ask Jeeves / Teoma each introducing a paid inclusion product for first time. Pay per click services also gained in popularity in 2002, with Google introducing their AdWords Select Pay Per Click product in February 2002 (that recently!) and Overture spreading their market reach via major partnerships with AOL Europe in January, MSN in February and September, InfoSeek in March, Yahoo in April, CNET and AltaVista in May, Lycos Europe in June, Yahoo Japan in November, CNN and Freeserve in December.

The popularity of Google's AdWords grew quickly throughout year, with AdWords becoming a major competitor to Overture, helped along by new partnerships with Earthlink in February, AOL in May, Ask Jeeves / Teoma and AT&T in July, InfoSpace in September and Yahoo Japan in November. In fact, AdWords became such a threat to Overture that they filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google in April 2002. I believe outcome is still pending on that one. Smaller PPC engines began to gain more market share in 2002, with eSpotting, FindWhat, Kanoodle and Ah-Ha each finding a market niche.

And who could forget LookSmart's disastrous entry to realm of pay per click in April 2002? The deceptive nature of LookSmart's announcement and their decision to force existing Express Directory Submission customers to rollover into new PPC system instead of "grandfathering" their listings demonstrated a complete lack of market understanding and for some, forever etched LookSmart brand with word "untrustworthy". It seems LookSmart are still paying for their mistake months later, with a reduced market share and a devastated reputation.

As predicted, search engine optimizers have had to embrace this trend towards Pay for Performance and integrate it within their traditional site optimization services in order to offer clients balanced, measurable and successful search engine marketing campaigns. As a result, term SEO has become increasingly eroded by more logical term SEM (Search Engine Marketer).

Score: Nostradamus

2. Increase in Paid Submissions

My original article predicted: "I believe we'll see other engines and directories introduce a fee for submission to their commercial categories. I think Google could be first of these".

While fairly new JoeAnt and GoGuides directories both introduced paid submission services late in 2002, they don't really counteract fact that LookSmart dropped their directory submission option in favor of PPC and (thankfully), Google have refrained from introducing a Paid Submission service. So much for THAT prediction! Score: NoSuchLuckus

>> 3. Crackdown on Spammers

My prediction here was: "With engines like Google leading way in crackdown on search engine spammers, other engines should follow suit in 2002. As a result, there should be far less spammers and more relevant results across search engines by this time next year."

Other search engines have indeed followed Google's lead against spam in 2002, by introducing more sophisticated search algorithms, (such as AltaVista's revamped algorithm consisting of 100+ ranking determining factors), by incorporating more spam filtration methods (such as those capable of detecting invisible text and hidden links), by providing spam reporting facilities and by boosting site relevancy factors such as link popularity when measuring sites against search queries.

Google still leads War Against Spam, with their dreaded PageRank site penalty scheme and their crystal clear anti-spam stance publicized via their Webmaster Guidelines. The result has been a victory for searchers - more relevant searches, less bacon and ham. Even those search engines and directories renowned for providing irrelevant results recognized what Google had known for years: need to keep searchers satisfied. Yahoo in particular got back to basics by end of 2002, partnering with Google to combine Google search results with their own directory listings instead of serving them up separately.

Score: Nostradamus

4. Growth of SEO Industry

Back then I said: "With importance of search engines finally sinking in, need for quality SEO services is booming in U.S. and U.K. I predict this solid demand will continue in 2002, especially in newly developing markets such as Australia/New Zealand and Europe".