Only one search engine left?

It seems that Microsoft’s Bing is In flagrante delicto. Google’s official blog and Danny Sullivan at Searchengineland revealed that in fact Bing is copying Google’s results whenever it suits him.

I will not comment on the morality of this decision from Bing but rather on something that Danny Sullivan observed about “search voices” : “For 15 years, I’ve covered search. In all that time, we’ve never had so few search voices as we do now“.

The fact is that only one relevant voice remained: Google. We have no other search engines to choose from. I mean relevant ones. Sure there are quite a few search engines that exist beside Google but none of them are really usable for searching. They all come and go. At one moment Cuil appeared and everyone started praising it as the next Google. But two years later on 17th of September 2010 Cuil shut down. Their results never were relevant enough. Now Blekko is the hipsters sweetheart. But maybe you could use this search engine if you’re in the US. Their international results are just poor.

So right now Google is clearly in a position where they have a monopoly on search. We depend on them for finding almost everything we search on the internet.

Is this something we want to do on the long term ? How can we be sure that the results they serve us are the right ones if we cannot verify them from another source ? Can we blindly trust just one company ? A company that ultimately has one goal (as every public company): to make money, more money, all the money they can ?

I don’t know the answers. Maybe you do.