Search Engine Marketing: Has Yahoo Gone Too Far?

If you mention the term 'search engine' to someone the first thing that will pop into their head is the infamous Google which is used over 200 million times a day world wide.

The majority of people, myself included, wonder what on earth they would do without it. In my day to day life, if there is ever anything I want to know or do I will depend on   Google to find it. If not Google then it will be Yahoo!, Bing or Ask: the wonderful group of know-it-all websites that have created a world where no question goes unanswered and no image is out of reach and where knowledge is endless.

It is no surprise then that Google smartly created Adwords and Adsense: A form of ‘paid search advertising’ and now 40% of online advertising expenditure is spent on search advertising (Klassen, 2008). This works by advertising websites by the side of the natural results, Google separates them so that the user is aware of the natural results and the ones which have paid to be there.

Adwords (by Google, Yahoo! And Msn also have versions) is when advertisers choose a set of workds or phrases which relate to their product or which will positively associate with the brand. If such words are entered the website willl appear. The service is ‘pay-per-click’ so the advertiser will only pay when the service works. Adsense is different because it is contextually targeted.                                                                                             

Every time I enter a search in Google I rely on it to produce a vast amount of websites and possibilities but I very rarely click past the first ‘o’ and more often than not I will settle for the first 3 results. This is due to a multiple of reasons, one of them being that I’m too lazy to traipse through the thousands if not millions of results but mainly because I believe that the results on the first page are normally the most reliable genuine and closely linked to my request. Yahoo! Have now created a form of paid ‘search advertising’ which takes advantage of this trust and embeds its advertisements in with the search results giving the illusion that they were natural. In 2009 Google were thinking of using interest based advertisements which were specific to each user by gathering information from the users’ cookies.

Although both of these alternative methods of Search Engine Marketing may produce better results, are they fair? They do not ask the consent of the search engine users, are producing misleading results and are beginning to become an invasion of privacy.