Search engine marketing by Google, in 2009 Yahoo! and Microsoft announced the intention to forge an alliance. The Yahoo! & Microsoft Search Alliance eventually received approval from regulators in the US and Europe in February 2010. Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "search engine marketing" was popularized by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories,
Search engine privacy from the search engine. One way is for the user to use a plugin or software that generates multiple different search queries for every real search query the user makes. This is an indistinguishability solution, and it functions by obscuring the real searches a user makes so that a search engine cannot tell which queries are the software's and which are the user's. Then, it is more difficult for the search engine to use the data it collects on a user to do things like target ads. Being that the internet and search engines are relatively recent creations, no solid