Well, currently Bing/MSN, Yahoo are so weak... Google is nearing 90 % popularity in organic search and that is overwhelming. I guess if things go like this for 2-3 years, Google will get even stronger. Interestingly, Yahoo was quite a strong rival 7-8 years ago. I remember that there was a time when Yahoo delivered less spammy, more relevant results than Google. Partly because they were relying on their Directory. Then Google got a lot better, they launched so many new services from AdSense to AdWords, Webmaster tools... Of course, Yahoo and Bing/MSN tried to keep up with similar services, but they still lag behind! If Yahoo-Bing-Facebook and perhaps another big company teamed up, they would still be no match for Google. Add Baidu to the list and perhaps they might have some perspectives. Google is far more popular. Google is more than just a brand. It's extremely easy to use and people tend to forget about the other search engines. I still wonder how small search engines, portals still survive these days... ScrubTheWeb, Lycos, UncoverTheNet... just to name a few...
Anything can happen in the web world. However, Google is undisputed winner in the search engine war. I think its really quite difficult to beat Google because it is very efficient and it has a very huge user base too.
There is no way that Google can be considered the best. It is certainly the most popular search engine, but definately not the best, in fact it is very probably the worst. The reason it is so popular is simply habit. People are used to using Google and whilst it used to be the best it is far from it now, but habit means that users stick with what they know and are used to.We need to see a massive, seismic shift and a shake up to either allow people to see why Google is no longer the provider of quality results. Users need to try other search engines and to compare results to see for themselves. I am not a disgruntled person, who has fallen out with Google by the way. I don't work for a Google competitor and have no problem with Google it's just a simple fact that Google results are very poor, and I really wish that this was not the case. If people ditch the Google habit and use one of the others, any of the others, I don't mind then maybe Google will start to see where they have lost the plot and do something about it. The problem with Google's results is that back in the day they used relavency above anything else. The results were delivered based on a searchers query and tried to deliver results that closest matched the question that was asked. Then as more websites appeared, they tried to get smart, they decided to weed out the bad websites and the rip off websites and the scammers and villians out there, and who wouldn't, it needed to be done. Nobody wants those sites in the results, me included.However, they then decided that relavency was no longer king. To ensure that all those bad websites were ignored they decided that a sites 'trust' was to play a bigger part in the algorithm. This is where it all started to go wrong because in Google's mind, a big part of trust was based on the age of a website and another was based on popularity or links to a site. This creates a problem. If age of a website is now a crucial factor then newer and possibly better websites are penalized just for being new. Great websites that have fewer links than established but not so great websites are penalized. If links are used to rank a website then a website has to generate high numbers of links to rank well, but Google does not want artificial links so monitors linking patterns and which sites are linking and whether they consider it to be an authority website etc.The end result of this is results that favour older established giants over newer less established specialists. These giants get their top positions through longevity and popularity, but the being old doesn't mean best. If a website sells 10,000 varied products like for example a supermarket chain, they may well get many links from forums and other websites pointing to one of their products which in Googles eyes means that they win on popularity but this does not mean that they are the best place to by every single one of their products from.I would rather see results from a variety of specialists than pages from these global chains. both Bing and Yahoo do are far better job than Google in this respect. They deliver results based on relavency, just like Google used to, not based on size, age and skewed popularity.To demonstrate this look at these results today. If I search Google for "which search engine is the best", we of course get a load of SEO based results but at number 4 is an article dated 2nd June 2003! I am sure that was a great article 9 years ago but Google's massively warped system still serves that up in 2012 in 4th position because it is from a long established, popular source, but relavent, no way, not 9 years later. On the first page are results from 6 and 4 years ago. Come on Google where is the fresh up to date results I am looking for? But no the results Google delivers are stale and old. I am in the UK by the way, so these are the results that Google is delivering to me here.Lets search for 'buy a mattress protector'. More than half of the ist page results are big chain stores that just happen to have a small range of mattress protectors, not a specialist with a more extensive range to choose from. Lets try 'travel cot for babies' yes same result, exactly the same big chains who came up in the results for the mattress protector query. 'portable dvd player', yes you guessed it, all the same big names again. Switch to bing or yahoo and the results are far less biased towards the big boys and although those big names still get results you will find smaller specialist niche companies in there as well, ones that Google ignores because they aren't big enough to have massive numbers of links, or old enough to be there.Google wants websites to have links to hit their popularity algorithm but not links that the website owner has been out looking for. They want natural links from consumers but they fail to tak into account the fact that the big chains will always have more links than smaller, possibly more relavent specialists will have.So come on give Bing and Yahoo a go, they are hugely better than the bloated, skewed giant that Google has sadly become
Apologies for the lack of formatting in my reply, for some reason, I could not break it down into paragraphs!
I agree with some of your points but having used them all, I still prefer Googles results to any other.
I hope so, but I don't think so. However, lately I'm getting much more accurate results with BING.. So I hope that BING will take over google (someday)
I seriously doubt Google will ever lose traction unless all of their data centers get compromised by a highly malicious virus which is ... nearly-impossible.. but... hmmm.. now that I think about it.. A huge anti-trust lawsuit could break that empire in a hurry....
I don't think they will be toppled, I think they might get a fright though if the rumoured partnership between Bing and Facebook ever comes to fruition.
Google is best then all , google is going on top day by day , so i don't thing so that it's will be down from Search engine ranking.