Is Google now a paid search engine?

[Whitey]

Here's some opinions from leading players in the travel space on the state of SEO on Google.

Priceline.com CEO Paul Hennessy: As far as SEO is, my view on that is it’s more of a desktop thought because as the devices get smaller and smaller and smaller, the number of choices from an SEO perspective on mobile decline dramatically. And so I believe it is a paid world. Google is an advertising engine and they drive paid traffic to advertisers.

Katz of Gogobot says that “SEO is a dying field”

Johannes Thomas, managing director at hotel-metasearch engine Trivago : : “I don’t think SEO is dead but for high-volume commercial search terms its importance is certainly decreasing steadily,” Thomas says. “Building a business on SEO traffic might be very risky nowadays, which was the case for Trivago several years ago.”
[skift.com...]

Are there still opportunities that they cannot see, and are they right?

What's your opinion?

[engine]

This story was raised with a different slant earlier, see [webmasterworld.com...]

Here's the thing: If you are in the same space as google, you're always going to find it tough, and pretty much, all those businesses are in a competing sector, so yes, they are correct, to an extent. But, Google is not the only way to get exposure, and too many people live in the past. The proliferation of the types of businesses in that report are in a sector of their own, and it could be suggested that there's room for a comparison site search service, which would include Google.

There's always an opportunity, imho, although it's much more competitive than it used to be.