One of the most important talents any management team of a business can have is to be able to detect changes in the marketplace and adjust how the business operates to function in that new market. Some call it "thinking outside the box" and others refer to this talent as "working with a new paradigm". Whatever the term of the day is, without the flexibility to change as the market changes, a business is destined to fade away.

All of business objectives remain the same in the world of internet marketing, but the "places" customers can be found are profoundly different. As such, it becomes critical that a business builds a modern and up to date web site that appeals to the customers perceptions of what they will expect when they come to shop with you and that stays up to date continuously s the internet continues to change and evolve.

But it isn't enough to just have a state of the art business web site up for modern internet business web site to succeed. Just as to be successful in the physical world, customers must come to you or you must go to them. And the primary method of letting customers know who you are and drawing them to your well designed web site is to connect to them through a search engine such as Yahoo, Google or MSN.

What Google May Know

It wasn't that long ago that a tremendous scare went through the internet community. The issue had to do with the huge amount of data that can be collected on individuals using search engines online. This large body of information naturally drew the attention of the Homeland Security agencies who are charged with the job of finding out all they can about potential sleeper cells of terrorism in this country.

The information that can be collected from you and I as we use the internet can tell an interested party a lot about your interests, what kind of business you are in, your religious views and your political affiliations. Powerful analytical tools are available to take large volumes of search information and translate that into profiles that would be of great interest to the government and to marketers who would love to be able to target specific populations for sales.

For Google, this information has significant value to them as they fine tune their search engine methodologies. They can methodically analyze this data to draw conclusions about how their search tools are working and how they should update the formulas that drive those tools to be more in step with how the internet audience is using cyberspace. Yes, this is taking advantage of their already dominant position to secure that position and make their toolset even more capable of staying ahead of the game. But we really cannot fault Google for using this data in that way. That is just good business.