Expect a shake up in the search engines

A lot has been going on over the last few years in the search engine industry. Many of the optimization techniques that used to work exceptionally well in the past no longer work at all, or worse yet, can get your website banned. These changes have been a response to unethical website owners’ attempts to manipulate their ranking, often for keyword phrases completely unrelated to their website. In addition to that, there is a growing competition between the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) that is sure to foster some major innovation in the very near future.

We’ve already seen the release of Google’s patent and learned about TrustRank . We’ve seen the backlash over the beta of Google Print and Google Video. We’ve also seen both MSN and Yahoo begin to emulate many of Google’s practices with varying degrees of success. We’ve seen personalization begin to develop in all three of the top search engines along with a plethora of other features such as maps, blogging, and translation tools. We can only expect these efforts to expand and be fine tuned.