Today I came across this article by Gord Hotchkiss entitled, “Seven Years as a Search Insider” and I felt like sharing it with those of you who have been in search as long as I have. Gone are the days of general keywords, in favor of long tail phrases… gone are 1c bids… in favor of $15 CPCs… gone is just doing “text search”… in favor of promoted videos, behavioral targeting and so much more…

Wow, has search evolved.

I feel like it was yesterday when we got the sysadmin e-mails from Overture and Google saying that we’d no longer be able to bid 1c for keywords… that the minimum bid was going to 5c… but if we didn’t change our ads, we’d be grandfathered in at 1c. Imagine the arbitrage we would have amassed if we kept those ads! Search has grown up from “an experiment in advertising” to a full blown industry. I am glad to have been part of it for over a decade.