Competition between search engines

[xpl0iter]

Do you think the competition between search engines are a good thing or bad?

I believe its a bad thing. For now google dominates the search market share. So everyone is trying to get their links on google's first page. Now what if each and every search engines hold an equal market share!

Now thats a lot of work for us as webmasters right? I mean each and every independent search engine has their own rules, do's and don't do's etc. I think we all will have a hard time optimizing for all the search engines.

Anyway this could easily be a good thing too. I mean what if there is no competition at all and Google becomes the king of search. Then google will end up doing several stuffs and make everything difficult for us with their ever changing rules and algorithms which is kinda what's happening right now!!

 

[Sam1]

It could be a good thing for webmasters. Search engines could potentially encourage other advertising networks along side them- they need to display ads too. If they were introduce a publisher option, this would help reduce the reliance on Adsense.

 

[Xyphien]

Competition is always good, but let's face it. As you stated Google has pretty much a monopoly over the search engine industry. When you think of SEO you don't think "ooh I need to get my site first on yahoo and bing." You think, and go after google which is why everyone talks about Panda safe stuff, ect. I actually think having the top three even 'bing, google, and yahoo' would be better for webmasters as you would not have to focus on keeping your rank, and struggling to get ranked. The competition would in return be split three ways as many people will focus on getting one site ranked on something, then another. This would actually make it easier for webmasters to get ranked in search engines.

However, sadly this is not the case and we all say screw yahoo, bing, ect. and we all mostly strive to get our google rank up as it's the top source on the web.

 

[DarkKnight]

There is not much difference between having a competition between two companies in same niche or having competitions between search engine, today in this competitive world everywhere there is competition whether in small businesses or in Large firms, every search engine in a similar way targets to achieve monopoly on the web for having their search directory present globally everywhere on the web for searching any information.
And as Xyphien said, Google today rules over the market as far as websearch is concerned, there is a very little chance of competition among other search engines to spread their hands like Google have done right from its launch way back in 1998.