Google has been the number one search engine for many years with Yahoo! and the rest, not trailing behind, but languishing. Because of Google’s dominance, search engine optimization has centered around the algorithms that go into Google’s organic search rankings. On one hand, this has made an SEO Consultant‘s life easier – on the other hand it has also made life more difficult.

Because Google is so far in front, spammers concentrate on its search rankings. Every now and then, Google makes a change to its algorithm, perhaps decides to penalize certain habits (like paid links several years ago) or to boost other areas (such as social media). Now that’s fine except that often the little players get caught in the cross fire and suddenly find their hard work coming undone.

Yahoo! is on its last legs.  When AOL is coming calling as a suitor it is definitely  ‘on its last legs’, as it has been  for many years now. Perhaps Bing will finally kill it off. The end result will not be a better internet – if anything, it will become poorer – not because of Yahoo! disappearing, but because of the lack of competition.

If we had four or five strong search engines, the competition would be much better. More importantly, spammers would have a tougher time. Five strong search engines means five different sets of algorithms. I am not sure that spammers would have such an easy time. An even bigger issue are the search results themselves.

Searchers may have noticed the changes creeping into the search results these days. I have mentioned it before; if you actually look at search results, they are becoming compartmentalized. You have image results grouped together, likewise video, news, products and local business (local search). What’s next? Will blogs be removed from organic search and get a little compartment of their own? Commerce, articles; where does it stop? Search results will become a page of compartments each dedicated to a particular segment.

While this is of course good for the user, and it may be good for some sectors of the web, but I am not sure it is going to be good for the web as whole. Competition has proven to be the best innovator and the only way to provide a quality service. Monopolies rarely have the interests of anyone except the self .  What are your thoughts – is a single all powerful search engine good for the internet?