I personally think Google is here to stay as SE leader, sort of like Microsoft is the undisputed OS leader even though there are many just as powerful alternatives. However, if GoogleTwo comes along then it would have to improve something that Google does poorly. So, what are some of Google's flaws?
One way or another it will eventually collapse. Might take a nuclear war though. And even by then it might emerge from the rubble.
Msdewey: yeah right. Google is the poster child of the 2000s, just like Microsoft was the poster child of the 1990s. Nobody stays pretty forever.
But they will stay big I think. See e.g. IBM. The fact that we compare them to IBM, Microsoft etc. does show though that they've made it. I think Google will be around for many years to come, especially if they continue to diversify their business (and monopolize them afterwards *G*). It will be interesting to see if Google in their business plans will be a complete SkyNet 10 years from now
I don't even think you can compare Microsoft and Google. Google actually realizes free apps are greater then another million of revenue wheras microsoft has never heard of helping the end user.
Five years ago Yahoo was the search engine of choice and home page of millions. Five years from now, Bamboozle will probably be emerging as the search engine of choice, giving results people never knew they wanted. Google is starting to suffer under the weight of its indexes, with millions upon millions of contentless pages indexed and sometimes returned at the top of search results. It cannot keep ahead of the hoards of expired domains which are picked up by MFA (made-for-advertising only) gangs, resulting in problems with legitimate looking results which lead to pages which only contain ads. Once the pages are reindex, the game is up. But until then . . . Google is still playing on people's ideas that it is a warm and fuzzy company instead of a multi-billion dollar company which is only concerned with mining your data for every potential advertsiing opportunity it can muster. That trust cannot last forever. Google is now ruled by people who are ruled by money. If you think otherwise then you have only yourself to blame when they use your data in ways you never imagined and do not condone. I will only retain my warm and fuzzy feeling when I finally run into an enterprise which has absolutely no interest in making any money under any circumstances. But, until we have personal replicators I do not think that day will come soon.
I remember when I started on the webs... webcrawler was THE search engine, soon after it was altavista, which I used all the way until google started up. Skipped yahoo. Never liked yahoo.