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 DuckDuckGo. There have been several well publicized breaches of search engine user privacy that occurred with companies like AOL and Yahoo. For individuals interested in preserving their privacy from search engines, there are many routes available to them, such as using an anonymity software like Tor that attempts to separate the user's location and information from their search. Search engines generally have privacy policies in order to inform users about what data of theirs they may be collecting and what purposes it may be used for. While these policies may be an attempt at transparency by search engines, many people