Will Google maintain its search engine power?

[ABCPS]

Reading through the SEOmoz threads, and also other forums, I can't help but notice that the majority of material covered is about SEO & SERP, white hat & black hat linking, social media blogs and articles, etc, etc.

Everyone trying to scramble to the top of their market via Google. If Google brought out a release saying that hopping down the street naked & having a neighbour googling that you had, for improved SERP ratings, would produce a weird downtown scenario.

What I am asking, is this: Does Google have too much power in determining to the world what is correct and what is not as a corporation. And are they and what they have a passing phase, or will they lose their dominance like Microsoft etc through technical change?

[ABCPS]

Morgan,

A phase in this case is a development stage. previous phases were newspapers, radio, television, Netscape. A future phase for all I know might be 3D imaging, which if another provider is quick on the uptake, could make Google's search engine obsolete over time.

[TeamTCO]

So long as Google continues to serve the end user better than their competitors in web search they will likely stay on top.  The mechanisms for search may change but there are some core concepts that will remain the same.

Does Google have too much power?  The end user decides if Google is right or wrong, so there's a bit of check and balance.  To say what they have is a passing phase would be inaccurate unless you consider phases to last more than a decade.

[CMC-SD]

I think it's a safe bet that the way we find information and making purchase decisions will undergo another dramatic change in the next few decades. I mean, thirty years ago, a bunch of ad copywriters were probably sitting around and wondering if the Yellow Pages' phone book market dominance would ever be challenged. They couldn't imagine web search, and we can't imagine what will replace web search.

In the meantime, Bing seems to be growing slowly but steadily. I wouldn't bet on them overtaking Google at any point, but it's conceivable that they could approach them in volume.

As for whether they have "too much power," obviously competition is good for consumers ... but we're not consumers, are we? I'm wondering, would we really prefer that search volume was equally distributed among, say, five or six different search engines? Meaning you now have to optimize for a half-dozen different algorithms in order to get lots of visitors from organic search? Oy.