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,
Microsoft Search Server to extract the text of the file for full text indexing as well. The handlers and iFilters MSS uses are the same as used by SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Search as well. The data sources that are to be indexed are identified by their URIs and have to be configured prior to indexing. The indexer updates the search index as soon as an item is indexed ("continuous propagation") so that the items can be queried against even before the indexing crawl is complete. MSS can also federate searches to other search services (including SharePoint and web search servers)