superclown2 - 10:15 am on May 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

Leaving aside the fact that, in many verticals at least, Google is now a 'big brand only' search engine which doesn't value sites with real content, the adverse publicity they are getting for various practices won't be helping them. This can only accelerate as more actions are taken against them in several countries at government level. The real fall, when it comes, could be sudden and devastating.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the tipping point comes, as bigger sites optimise for Bing/Yahoo rather than Google. I already have a number of sites optimised in this way at the moment and I am more than happy with the results. Currently about 17% of my clicks (I'm in the UK) come from Bing/Yahoo but the amount of business I get from these clicks is much higher because of their superior conversion rate.