During this recent discourse about the All-Mighty-Google and its competitors, I got wondering. 🙂

Imagine, you are the best software coder on Earth and you have come up with a program of amazing elegance and simplicity that will spider the internet, database the results and produce a fantasic search interface. Could you compete with the main players?

Now, there is no real need to bother with SEO on your site – I very, very much doubt anyone goes to Google and types “search engines” into the box.

As a small site (i.e. brand new) you are unlikely to get much publicity from normal channels – For example would anyone know your site was there to visit your blog etc? And the chances of someone visiting your site “by accident” must be slim to say the least.

In reality, the only options you would have are to get some offline publicity (sent a press release to news agencies on a quiet news day for example) or be lucky enough to get some social networking results. For a tech site, Digg.com will work wonders and could possibly generate enough traffic to actually make the brand-new-search-engine.com site take off.

If it didnt get traffic from Digg.com (which doesnt imply the site is good or bad, its more a case of how “cool” people think it is) then the site will, in all probability totally flounder.

MSN, Yahoo et al, can almost compete with Google but they come from many years as established engines with an already well known brand. If Yahoo was born today would it be able to function?

Is this centralisation of Search Engine dominance a good or bad thing? I am not sure but it “feels” wrong. There is a similar situation in the online bookshop world. Most bookstores have their online presence managed by Amazon, albeit with a different front end. Is this one step short of online monopolies (similar to the accusations made against Microsoft).

The matter is much worse if you are a non-tech site as you cant even get the Digg.com traffic to raise your profile. Sadly, it seems in the early years of the 21st century the web is becoming more and more polarised.