Well, daring question I suspect.

For the last couple of years Google has reigned supreme in the arcane world of search engines. For most new websites “getting listed” on Google is the number 1 priority and, helpfully, the Mighty Goog offer lots of services to assist. (Sitemaps, stats tracking etc.) This is backed up by an almost relentless SEO industry in which business will either lie (guaranteed placing in Google) or be honest and admit they can offer nothing of value.
All well and good. 

The dark art of SEO is often shrouded in mystery – maybe deliberately so -  but, in a nutshell, if you pay an SEO company you are pretty much only paying for a re-write of your copy and possibly some backlinks of a site they host. Some people may think this is worth the money, but I am not one of them. Google has a set way of deciding how it will rank sites, and few if any people outside the company are privvy to that knowledge. As they are the “good guys,” Google provide a large amount of information so that anyone can SEO their own sites with just as much chance of success as any company out there. Despite this people still flock to SEO like the holy grail.

Anyway – that is the background. SEO is nearly always about getting a high page rank in Google and SEO is pointless.

Now, on to the critical question.

This is something that has been debated on USENET www / html / webmaster groups a bit over the last couple of months, and for the last four weeks I have been making parallel searches on Google and MSN. The results were somewhat surprising. (Before you read on, all this was based on general searches I have been doing and only looking at the results returned on the first page. No hard and fast stats were kept so all figures are based on approximations)
Generally the top link in both Google and MSN was valuable and relevant to the search term. Sadly, about 25% of the rest of the links on the page in Google were SEO’d crap with as much relevance as a box of frogs. MSN on the other hand, for my searches, produced pretty much a page full of useful links and often totally different ones from the first page on Google.

Now this is something that truly goes against the grain.

Here at Why Dont You we have had a hand in developing quite a few sites – and often getting them ranked in Google is a living hell of sitemaps, begging for back links etc – yet the same sites have appeared in MSN’s first page after a couple of days with no overt (or intentional) SEO.

Now, dont get me wrong, I am not crying the Fall of Google or anything. It still remains incredibly responsive and fantastic at its job. I do think people may be making a mistake if they soley rely on Google for their search queries. There are lots of search engines out there, if your search turns up junk on the first page of Google try one of the others.

I remember when Google first went “big” and people were talking about how cool it was, how fast etc. Basically this is because Google did searches and nothing else. Its interface was uncluttered compared to Yahoo / MSN etc (which still look horrible). But lately, it seems as Yahoo / MSN try to move away from the portal idea, Google have re-invented the 1990s and are heading down the road of portal services (if not a portal “look and feel”… yet…).

As a parting shot – to show fairness – can I suggest that everyone tries a few different search engines over the next couple of weeks. You may be surprised.