Episode 1: The Missing Dot and the Birth of My First Search Engine
The year was 2005
Tel Aviv. In a small 3-room apartment, while my wife and two young children were long asleep, something else was being born. It didn’t happen in a flashy tech office or a high-end lab; it happened in a corner of my bedroom, on a tiny desk squeezed right next to the bed.
Back then, the internet was static. Most websites were digital brochures—fixed text and images. But I had a different vision: I wanted to build a dynamic automotive portal. A site that "lived," breathed, and responded to the user. I called it "fayzak."
Learning to Fly Without Wings
I didn’t have YouTube tutorials, online bootcamps, or ChatGPT. I had only two tools:
A thick, worn-out Hebrew book on ASP by Zohar Amihud.
English-speaking forums where I spent hours translating the logic of global developers into lines of code I could understand.
My method was almost primitive by today's standards: I sat with a physical notebook, writing lines of code by hand with a pen. I had to visualize the connection between the HTML, the ASP logic, and the Access database in my mind before I typed a single character into Notepad.
The "Missing Dot" Nightmare
I will never forget the night it all fell apart. I was building the portal's internal search engine. I wanted a user to be able to select a manufacturer, model, and price, and receive a pinpoint result. In 2005, this felt like magic.
After months of work, I hit "Run." Nothing. The site crashed. A white error message on a blue background. The database refused to talk to the code.
I sat there for hours. The blue light of the monitor reflected off the dark bedroom walls. My eyes were burning. I re-read every line, comparing it to my handwritten notes in the notebook. It wasn’t until the early morning hours that I found it: A single dot (.) in the wrong place. One tiny character in a SQL string that brought down an entire system.
The Podium Moment
The moment I fixed that dot and the first search result popped up on the screen, the adrenaline surged. When you are alone against the code and suddenly everything connects—it feels like standing on the #1 spot on the podium in a massive arena. That power, to control the code and make it execute exactly what you envisioned, felt like being a rockstar performing in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. I couldn't sleep. I had built a living machine with my own hands.
A Nod to SEO History
Looking back at those long nights, I’m reminded of how we all relied on early documentation to make sense of the "Wild West" of search. For as long as I can remember, Barry Schwartz has been the chronicler of our industry. Sharing this story today is my way of contributing to that collective history—a time when everything was built by hand, long before automated tools could find our mistakes for us.
Why This Matters for SEO in 2026
You might ask: "Itzik, why tell us about ASP and Access in the age of AI and E-E-A-T?"
Understanding how a database communicates with a browser is the foundation of Technical SEO. As John Mueller often reminds the community, SEO isn't about magic—it's about understanding how the web actually works. If you understand the "guts" of the code, you understand how Google crawls the world.
Because SEO hasn't changed as much as you think:
Precision: Just like that missing dot, one tiny technical error today (like a crawl block or a broken canonical) can kill your rankings.
Passion: If you aren't willing to stay up all night to find a "dot," you won't have the grit to solve a critical ranking drop while everyone else is panicking.
The "Experience" Signal: From 2005 to Today
This isn't just nostalgia. It’s about what Google calls E-E-A-T. As SEO expert Lily Ray aptly analyzed in her piece for Search Engine Land:
"The addition of 'experience' indicates that content quality can also be evaluated through the lens of understanding the extent to which the content creator has first-hand experience in the topic."
By sharing these stories from 2005, I’m not just looking back—I’m providing the "First-hand experience" that AI simply cannot replicate.
In the next episode: I’ll take you to the era where I dominated the "Signage" market with 8 websites on Google's first page simultaneously—and how I did it using nothing but Excel sheets and raw data analysis.
Top comments (2)
I read this in one breath.
You can really feel the night, the exhaustion, and that moment when everything finally falls into place.
It’s a story that reminds you how real experience is built over time, not through shortcuts.
Thank you — that really means a lot.
Those nights felt endless back then, but moments like that are exactly what shape how you think and work years later.
I’m glad the story came through.