Counter intuitive as it may sound, but Google risks becoming the next Altavista.  The once industry leader who lost virtually it’s huge market share to Google with their release of a [...]]]> I was thinking about this today – how it’s in Google’s best long term interest to have a good, strong viable competition to it’s search engine.

Counter intuitive as it may sound, but Google risks becoming the next Altavista.  The once industry leader who lost virtually it’s huge market share to Google with their release of a much better, less spam infested search engine.

The real threat to Google is from SEM (Search Engine Marketing) experts who are forever gaming the results so users will become increasingly frustrated in not finding what it is that they are looking for.  And here lies the problem for Google – if they’re the only player in town – they get the full force of marketing departments forever trying to outflank their page ranking systems.

In a perfect world Google would have equal market share with 3 or 4 players – dividing the attention of SEM experts.  Ultimately any search engine lives and dies by the results, and being the number one player, and virtually the only player may be Google’s undoing.