Just in from my “biting the hand that is going to feed me at next week’s Google Party” department:
It must be great to go unchallenged in your sector, especially in the hyper-competitive big money internet extravanza.
Over at WebMasterworld people are doing their usual fawning over the greatness of Google search, this despite the fact that Yahoo and MSN are close in quality according to most objective analyses, that history suggests dominance is often short lived, and that search dominance really does not bode well for anybody except Google. I posted the following comment over there:
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I still use mostly Google out of habit but I predict that Yahoo’s recent move to bring social network and tagging information into the results will be successful and may even land them on top until Google relaxes it’s “no human ranking” approaches.
This thread surprises me as most objective measures indicate that Google is the best, but not by much and certainly not always best if compared to good vertical search tools. Habit is driving SE choice, not careful analysis of result sets.
Also, I think there will be legal battles when Vista launches over default search in future versions of IE browsers, MS will win most of them, and Google market share will go down with new users.
Search dominance is not healthy for users or webmasters – this community should recognize that more than most.
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Joe Duck 