Recently when I was searching for something on google,msn and yahoo with a particular keyword I found a particular site on the first page of MSN and on 3rd page of Yahoo. It was not one day coincidence but the website still hold same ranking on Yahoo and Msn. The most significance think to notice was that the site does not have good traffic. The keyword is search for 7700,000 times in google, I don't know how many times is that keyword search on msn or yahoo. But should be significant. There are many incident that forces me to think that search engine are loosing popularity. Have maximum internet surfers already moved to Rss feeds or social network site like Stumbleupon or Digg. Search engine are definitely getting insignificant as far as popularity is concerned. People prefer to search stumbleupon and digg or different forums to get the answer for the queries. Have you ever notice that whenever you search for something on these search engine they initial response that you recieve are all from some forums and social network site. Now people visit those sites and they are happy with the outcome they never visit the search engine. They know search engines wil direct them to same forums. So what about all those SEO practices all that is done for search engine's and if your site can get popular without search engine's then for what do you need Search Engine Optimization. People who are thinking to change their site according to search engine they should Site Optimization for forums and Social network site.
I totaly agree to a point.... Its true that there has, say in the last 5 years been a massive surge in forums specialy since people can now do them for next to zero cost. also with places like stuble and digg is also losing the SE's searches. But i think its a very minute amount, I wouldnt even think google knows as its searches increase each year. I would think this is due to each new generation of kids that are internet geeks. Unlike when i was younger, internet wasnt even heard of, i'd be out on my bike at the crack of light and not back until sunset.
Not at all, a huge proportion of internet users dont even know what social bookmarking is. I administrate a large forum of Ebay users (mainly women) and i guarantee if i posted about Digg or Stumbleupon noone would have a clue. Yahoo and MSN is what is loosing its appeal, i rank for 100s of competative phrases and they bring pitiful traffic. Also you cant be certain of the true search volume in Google, your figure may be off. Plus the site you mentione may have a terrible title and description and 95% of users are clicking one of the other 9 entries on the page.