SEO Basics
Write a title and description and see exactly how — and whether — they'll get cut off in a real search result. Runs in your browser — no server call, no tracking.
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Where Search Engines Started
Archie, built in 1990 by Alan Emtage, is generally credited as the first search engine — though it only indexed FTP filenames, not web content. Google, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, changed everything with PageRank, an algorithm that ranked pages by the links pointing to them rather than just keyword matching.
Why Titles Get Cut Off
Google renders titles by pixel width, not a fixed character count — but roughly 50-60 characters is the safe zone before truncation on desktop. This is a display constraint, not an official rule, which is why the exact cutoff varies slightly by which letters you use.
Meta Descriptions Don't Rank You
A common misconception: the meta description has no direct effect on ranking position. Its entire job is to earn the click once you're already showing in results — which is why writing it like ad copy, not a keyword dump, actually performs better.
The Term "SEO"
"Search engine optimization" entered common use in the mid-1990s, as early webmasters began reverse-engineering what made pages rank on the first search engines. It's one of the few marketing disciplines that only exists because a piece of software's internal logic became worth studying.