I think I'm falling out of love with MSN. I checked my rankings using MultiTrac this morning and I went from number 1 to below 100 on a number of keywords I'm tracking. At first I thought I uncovered a bug in my software, but a manual check confirmed the results.. :-( I took a beating on Yahoo! as well. Not so bad on Google.. I hope this is a temporary thing.
I've been very frustrated with Google for a while, but MSN has really been ranking our sites well. We have followed the model of: <h1>kw</h1> <h2>kw</h2> <p>kw</p> <h2>kw</h2> <p>kw</p> <h3>kw</h3> <p>kw</p> kw = keyword Obviously content goes with the kw but this structure has ranked all our sites high MSN. They are my favorite SE now.
Obviously Google gives the most traffic, but I'm betting MSN takes some market share from them quickly. My reports all show MSN searches on the rise. While they may never be a "Google" they will continue to rise in terms of overall traffic.
Microsoft is smart, they lock out the competition and they have done this well over the years. When they come out with Longhorn with built in browserless search they can do considerable damage to Google, that is why the search war is really the "OS War". This is why Google is promoting the Firefox browser to get folks to switch. In addition, Microsoft will claim that Google is spyware with their new "anti-spyware software" and get folks to delete Google software off of their boxes. So in this way if folks are locked into M$ Windows OS, then they gain search market share.
Google will not have huge competition for the next five years. But they are hiring people for the generation search technology. Their text search engine is the best and it will be foolish for their competitors to go after text based engines anymore. Because text is making its way to shockwaves and other formats. So MSN and all are not working on text anymore. They are working on other formats (listen to the bill gates interview to BBC), and so Google too have to. Text search technology is in its ripe old age. It cannot grow anymore.
I hate to burst your bubble KC, but why is Google indexing every book in every library they can get their hands on
... and that's why G even starts such things like Google Code. Moving ppl closer to Open Source and Linux (or at least Windoze alternatives ^^)
What is 'text' to a computer? ones and zeros. What is a "high tech" thing like films and music to a computer? ones and zeros. I think you may be right about the search technology reaching a zenith. The real question is where is the next leap for indexing those results? Our limit is our imagination.