Media: All about ... Search marketing.(Company rankings)

Dark art or boring necessity? Alasdair Reid is prospecting for digital gold.

Google 'Frederick Marckini' and the top-ranked result sends you off to an iProspect.com page outlining every member of the iProspect senior management team ... except Marckini himself, who clearly inhabits a higher celestial plane.

For your average search guru, this - albeit so subtle it's almost inverted - is called showing off.

Contrast that with what happens when you Google 'Dean Gardner'. Here, you end up on a Channel 4 page about a freelance wedding-dress designer and drag artiste who joined the Foreign Legion.

Which we enjoyed reading - but this isn't the real (for our current purposes) Dean Gardner, aspiring search guru, who last week joined Omnicom Media Group from The Search Works as the director of search strategy, OMD International. He's clearly promising, though not yet ready for that most auspicious stage in a guru's career - when self-optimisation is achieved.

And he wasn't the only aspiring guru poached last week by OMG from The Search Works. Cristina Sagarduy also joined as the managing director, search, OMG EMEA.

We read much these days of the continuing growth of search revenues and of their importance in the struggle for supremacy among a handful of the internet's monster companies. We hear less (notwithstanding the odd row about Google's charmless business methods) about the advertisers and the marketing strategies financing this boom. Still less of the agencies that help these advertisers to spend their money in this area.