For those of you who’ve noticed the blog has been a bit quiet lately was because I took a vacation for a few weeks, and it was brilliant.  Apart from doing some holiday updates on my personal blog, I pretty-much switched off and took a proper break (something I haven’t done in a very long time), but now it’s back to work again… And after a week of catching-up with my staff, clients, stats, side-projects, the blogosphere, scanning the headlines on the social media sites etc. etc. it almost feels like i haven’t been away at all.

Since being back, one thing has become painfully obvious - this industry is truly dynamic and a lot more goes on than I had previously realised, but when part of your daily tasks involve reading a few dozen search marketing / optimisation and geek culture websites, you simply take the constant information overload for granted.

Sure there are always those stable posts you read on every second blog about link building, on-site optimisation techniques, Page Rank, all the countless lists and better ways to effectively use social media etc. etc. But lately there seems to have been a lot of other hype, updates, rants and sledging.

There has been a lot of negativity, some nasty words and cat-fighting going on between some prominent SEOs.  Now the odd rant here and there is expected, and there’s always some backlash when someone does something that makes the industry look bad (or at least perceived as ‘bad’ such as the linkbait debacle about prostitutes and 13-year-olds…. which i personally thought was brilliant) but lately it appears to have gotten far worse and a little personal.  There have been stabs at major SEO communities that I’m involved with, name calling between other SEOs, some search marketers are excommunicating themselves from other SEOs because of the bickering… it’s almost like we’re back in elementary school!

Then there’s Google who recently did a PR and penalty update, just launched knol (their own little wikipedia killer) and to top it all off, there’s also talk of them offering Digg a whopping $200m for their site.

Over the last couple of years Google’s ‘nice guy - do no wrong’ image has been slowly shifting so now they’re being viewed by the greater public as yet another mega conglomerate. So I was excited to see the launch of Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’)  - a new rival search engine with their guns aimed directly at Google.   Don’t get me wrong, I like Google and all their tools and apps (a lot) but i also think that a little healthy competition is essential.

There are some very smart and experienced people behind Cuil but unfortunately after having a play the relevance of the results weren’t brilliant (almost verging on poor to be honest).  So hopefully they can sort their stuff-out because if they can get-it-together, there could finally be a worthy opponent to Google, but then again, they could continue to produce crap search results and we’ll be back to square one.

For the last couple of years there has been a reasonable amount of talk that the search industry will see some major changes.  This has already started with the introduction of all the ‘blended’ search results and Google branching further into the social media fields with YouTube, Feedburner, Knol and perhaps adding Digg to their portfolio.  Plus the potential that an ‘underdog’ search engine could make some waves in the industry… maybe we’ll start seeing some of those changes.

Or perhaps I’ve just jumping to conclusions, over analysing and getting prematurely excited over deals and search engines that may eventuate to nothing… but that’s what happens when I try and digest six weeks worth of industry reading over the space of a couple of days.

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