Category: search market share

We’ll be pointing fingers at each other for years but I honestly don’t think we’ll ever know how it began. All we can be certain of is that the arms race between search engines and search marketers has spilled over into a new arena. And it was not a sudden, drastic expansion of the war but rather a slow, gradual one that has taken shape with our full knowledge, understanding, and apathy. We are, as search marketers, both creators and users of search data. We search constantly for both personal and marketing reasons and we do our best to track other people’s search data. The search engines have always had the upper hand in the War for Search Data, Google especially since it introduced “(Not Provided)” to its referral stream. But now Internet users are striking back in a large way at both marketers and search engines, undoubtedly for a variety of reasons, but perhaps spurred on by the recent debates over Internet privacy. Browser plugins that block advertising have been around for years but now plugin providers are claiming millions of downloads for their tools. I admit I use an ad blocker in at least one of my own […]