Will Google Be Broken Up?
Google has been getting questioned more heavily as of recent over it’s control of the search engine market.
I personally think Google is a great company despite the fact its now multiple daily updates can drive me a bit crazy. That being said, I also believe they have way too much control over the search market.
The reality is that roughly 83% of all searchers use Google and that means they are the only ones any real SEO professional is optimizing for. This of course helps Google give out better results as the companies that are most concerned with their optimization and are willing to put time and/or money into it are usually the better companies.
I can honestly say that I believe my personal SEO clients are better at what they do than the vast majority of their competitors. They simply care more and it shows in every aspect.
Back to the point… For the last few months it has seemed to be a question of “when” not “if” the Federal Government will step in and force Google to break up. Personally, I think this would be beneficial too. There are a LOT of really great search engines out there which nobody has ever heard of that produce as good of if not better results than Google.
If you have a few minutes, check out DuckDuckGo.com 
Perhaps a breakup would not only give Google more competition from a spilt off of its engineers but it would allow some of the smaller search engine companies to shine through as well.
The Facebook Monkey Wrench
Facebook, this past year acquired at least one of Google’s former algorithem engineers and has put him to work on creating a search engine within Facebook. There are many who believe this will be enough to halt the talk of breaking Google up. I am not one of those people and I will tell you why.
Facebook in my opinion is going to focus its search engine on its users as an internal source rather than an external one. With more users than almost every country on earth combined (excluding China) it could potentially take a huge draw away from people leaving its site to go visit Google. That doesn’t make Google any less dominate in its particular field though.
I Need To Up My Social Media Presence Don’t I?
This may be the understatement of the year! Unlike Google that tries to take over and dominate everyone else, Facebook tends to have a much more open policy. You can fully integrate your Facebook account with Twitter, Pinterest, and almost every single other social media platform.
Even if you have a favorite Social Media outlet that isn’t currently integrated, you could actually build one yourself since they have an open developers platform.
To me that says that the more ingrained in social media you are and the more you have integrated all of your social media outlets with Facebook, the more searches you are likely going to show up in when it goes live.
Wayne Gretzky said you don’t go to where the puck is, you go to where the puck is going to be. Well, now is the time to get the jump on your competitors and beat them to the puck!
Stay Positive, Stay Focused!
Robert Clark
Stepping out of my comfort zone!