In October of 2000 a start-up company launched a self-service ad program with 350 customers. The company was Google and the program was, of course, AdWords. While practitioners of SEM were then relatively rare, those employed full-time by companies to optimize websites for search engines were almost unheard-ofSome ten years and billions of dollars in AdWords spending later, the profession of in-house SEM is an established one, and poised on the brink of maturity.
