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,
ChaCha (search engine) April 2009, Rick Reilly spent some time working for ChaCha for an article on "ESPN The Magazine". ChaCha (search engine) ChaCha was a human-guided search engine. It provided free, real-time answers to any question, through its website, or by using one of the company's mobile apps. The company, founded in 2006 by Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic, was based in Carmel, Indiana, United States, part of the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Its name comes from the Mandarin Chinese word "cha" (), which means "to search." ChaCha answered questions through the use of independent contractors called Guides. Guides were paid $0.02