Never index your own book.
I think we compete with lots of different players in different areas. So clearly, in our core business, which is search, Microsoft and Yahoo! are the big players, and they continue to compete. There are a lot of smaller search engines as well.
So the first things that you see when you look up something on Google could be dependent on the amount of advertising or something else. Since it is a profit making institution, it is going to reflect the interests and concerns of those who fund it, which is advertisers.
Good website practice and optimizing for conversion usually makes for good search engine optimization. These work together to ensure you drive quality traffic and can persuade that traffic to help you meet your business goals.
Google demotes search results that don't get clicked on.
Google appears to be the worst of the major search engines from a privacy point of view; Ask.com, with AskEraser turned on, is among the best.
Competitors argue that Google rigs its search algorithms to demote listings for competing search engines. Many of the allegations of demotion come generally from sites of pretty questionable quality, such as Nextag and Foundem. Some of Google's primary competitors in 'specialized search' clearly place well in search results - Amazon and Yelp.
Anyone unhappy with Google can use other search engines - including DuckDuckGo and Blekko, along with Bing or Yahoo.
You know, you can go to the fiftieth thing on a Google list and that's the one you want, but the ones you are going to be directed to are the funders.
