In his blog post entitled The search engine wars are over, my friend José Roig suggests that someone needs to break the news to Microsoft, Yahoo!, Ask, and the Yellow Pages and let them know that they lost the Search Engine War. I disagree. Here’s why:
It’s not over until it’s over.
Years back many people were ready to declare Microsoft (MS) the winner of the browser wars. Thank God no one did or we may not have Firefox, Safari or Chrome today. Yes, MS is still used slightly more than those other browsers, but they are all gaining ground fast and they are forcing MS to make their product better.
I also think that when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you should definitely to improve results on other search engines in addition to Google. Doing this will improve your Google rankings. If I’m able to get my site listed higher on Yahoo — both in the search engine an directory, then Google will take into account those in-bound links.
Yes, Google is king (for now), and we should focus on improving rankings in Google; however, the rest of the world can not be ignored. If I told you a few years ago that Apple would be selling more computers today than Dell you may have laughed at me…but today Apple DOES sell more. So I say let this war rage on and maybe we’ll continue to get better search results out of it. Or, possibly a new search engine? Or both?
For the record…
- I think José has lots of great ideas
- I prefer Apple OS X over Microsoft Windows (I use both everyday)
- Google is my default search engine
- Firefox is my favorite web browser