Newsweek reports that Google search may be slipping. I have complained for a long time that Google searches tend to have too many results, and many of those results are not relevant. It turns out lots of other people have noticed that as well. More and more Internet searches are being performed by other search engines like Ask, Dogpile, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
One of Google's weaknesses is that a primary criteria it uses for search results is the number of other links that point to a site. This worked very well when Google was starting up, but it is easy to create links, and this has led to link farming, which is setting up sites with nothing but links to other sites. Link farm sites improve the Google rating score, but also typically carry Google ads, so link farmers get ad revenue and can artificially force their own sites to the top of Google searches.
Google search has proved more resistant to competition than I expected, but as other search engines get better, Google could lose ground quickly if the tide turns. Just ask former giants like AOL.