| Search engines are playing an increasingly important role in Internet marketing and commerce. Having once been sidelined by the major portals in favor of other 'sticky' features such as news, search is once again central to portal strategies. Yahoo has recently spent almost US $2 billion acquiring other search technology providers to compete with Google more directly. The world-wide search market is forecast to grow from US $2.1 billion in 2003 to US $7 billion by 2007. However, against the background of a rapidly consolidating search market, there are increasingly sophisticated technology tools and approaches to utilizing search engines to achieve marketing goals. |