dstiles - 11:37 pm on Jan 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

I think the future may be meta engines that do not rely on any single engine for results. I've used one of them almost exclusively for a couple of months now and generally got better (or at least as good) results.

There are a lot of SEs that I've previously blocked for various reasons that I am now looking to let back in - SEs that have grown from the useless to the useful over the past few years. In most cases they would almost never return results in their own right because 99.9% of traffic (in MY case) comes from four or five SEs, even when the others were allowed. If the topmost of those SEs is suiciding then it's time to let in more of the tiny ones and hope meta search builds up.

Apart from that, it's all very well saying "stop relying on google for traffic and build your own by word of mouth" but how many people can actually do that? I run several local information & history sites where the information is compiled from many sources, mostly old paper in library archives and walking the streets with a camera and notebook. The sites are "hobby" class but draw a lot of visitors world wide. If I blocked them from google how on earth could I promote them? I certainly couldn't afford to pay signficant money, even for adwords. So world-wide the internet would be poorer as our content disappears from view. This is so in a large number of cases. Most people here are talking spending money to make money but this concept does not apply in our case. Everything is free apart from a small hosting fee (on my own server).

Google "promised" it would show my sites to the world. In return I helped promote google, verbally and by links, over the other engines of the time. Now I'm about to change allegiance and promote at least one other SE before we lose all of our traffic through google's "monetising" of the SERPS. They haven't yet (as far as I can see) begun pushing my content onto their home page but when they do I will look seriously at adding googlebot / disallow to robots.txt and blocking all of their IP ranges.