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If Teoma, Inktomi and Fast could get their act together. penetrate the conciousness of the browsing public and increase their respective market shares, Google wouldn't be in a position to shake so many people up.
Coming up on the first or second page of Google most of the time helps new readers to find a site... but then again the same most relevant sites tend to come up somewhere on the first or second page of _all_ search engines most of the time... so if Google only had the attention of 25% of the browsing public, a lot of excellent sites wouldn't be so affected by a radical shift in SERPS on Google.
The trouble is there are presently huge numbers of non-technical people who use the web who don't know to use any other search engine apart from Google...
So, three things occur to me:
1) Any one search engine having more than a 25% market share on searches is a very bad thing. I don't think regulators should step in, I just think that more startups shouldn't be afraid to take on Google at its own game (think nutch...) I would be much happier if there were as many equally popular search engines as there are equally popular national supermarkets in any given country. Google gets I don't know how many thousand times more searches than alltheweb, but it certainly isn't that many thousand times better than Google.
2) In order to spur the emergence of a new generation of search engines, I would be delighted to see some sort of official webpage classification protocols built into w3c specs which could be automatically verified by search engines... the kind of thing that meta tags tried to be before they ended up being abused... I don't know if it's possible to come up with a simple system (simpler than meta-tags) which is abuse-proof. Can't a modified Dewey system be applied to webpages? At least then all new search engines would have a baseline from which to start - at the moment - since the wide-scale dismissal of meta tags - the baseline (if there is one) tends to be dmoz, which is sometimes excellent and sometimes horribly inadequate.
3) dmoz really needs to become the master directory of the internet it aspires to be... because the best way to separate ill-quality from good quality is still by human review.
Okay it doesn't have to be dmoz, but please can we have one high-quality, reliable, bias-free, master index that covers about 5 billion pages? (Yes, I really mean this. No I don't know how it could be implemented unless we see a return of the days when the people who used the web, built the web).
These are all just thoughts born of frustration from the uncertainty of the current update.
I haven't gone into the practicalities because I'm looking at the whole thing from ten thousand feet. No I don't want to see the limitless creativity and growth of the web stifled, but yes, I would like to get rid of the current scenario where in order to make your webpages easy to find you have to do so much more than simply write pages that conform to basic recognised standards. (I guess the professional SEOs won't be with me on this one >;->).
The trouble is with PR is that it equates popularity with quality. Given that high quality sites are still published every day (with no links) and low quality sites have been collecting links for years... I can't see how much longer giving PR much sort of significance at all in the Google algo will still keep returning good results.
A state of affairs where Google can return a poor quality information resource on a given topic, yet be unable to find a high quality information resource on the same topic and yet where it remains in pole position for the vast majority of searches is a state of affairs in need of repair.
The trouble is with PR is that it equates popularity with quality. Given that high quality sites are still published every day (with no links) and low quality sites have been collecting links for years... I can't see how much longer giving PR much sort of significance at all in the Google algo will still keep returning good results.
Well Said Ronin. This bothers me greatly. I can not stand publishing a great relevent site that will be buried nowhere right off the bat. I do believe that maybe we should have to do a bit more work to get them in the top of the serps. However, in my opinion, this area of Google's algo is way more flawed than people think.
There is Yahoo/Inktomi and MSN.
