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 to mean that people had the right to request that some information about them be wiped from search results provided by search engine companies like Google. The background of this case is that one Spanish citizen, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, set out to erase himself from Google's search results because they revealed potentially compromising information about his past debts. In the ruling in favor of Mario Costeja Gonzalez, the court noted that search engines can significantly impact the privacy rights of many people and that Google controlled the dissemination of personal data. This court decision did not claim that all citizens