The end of Google's virtual monopoly?

[abbeyinternet]

Finally, it seems, the tide is turning after all these years. The search engine industry must now accept the fact that paid listings do not necessarily make good or relevant listings, and follow Google's example. This is a momentous triumph of quality of service over profiteering.

MSN has always provided a search engine, but the very presence of this new MSN Search forum on WebProWorld is an indicator of the extent to which the balance of power is expected to shift in the months and years ahead.

At present, most of the traffic to our network of websites comes from Google, compared with about half only four years ago. But eventually a high rank in Google will not be the one and only Holy Grail of web site promotion. As the search engine playing field levels out, website providers must embrace the change.

[scallihan]

I'm still getting the lion's share of my search engine-generated traffic from Google, with 82.4% from Google, 7.1% from Yahoo, and 4.5% from MSN.

I'm ranking pretty good in all three for my keyphrases, so the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned. Makes me nervous to be dependent upon one search engine for so much of my traffic, so wouldn't mind seeing it spread around a bit more. Looks like Microsoft, however, could be planning the same kind of "embrace and extend" strategy against Google that it used successfully against WordPerfect and Netscape. They want to capture the market, not just a market share. If it is a matter of Google or MSN as the sole king of the search engine hill, I'll take Google.