Aaron Wall has made a great point over at SEO Book about Google moving toward a blended search engine. What’s the blend about, you might ask? As Wall puts it:

If you didn’t understand what I was talking about in Google Closing the Window of Opportunity, the above images should do a good job of showing how search is moving away from purely algorithmic to an editorial blend approach, and how Google is making itself a leading vertical search engine in many verticals.

This is the same slope that I think Yahoo went down and it has cost them dearly over the years. Google made it big because their search results were relevant, unbiased, and “untouched”. Now that Google is going more and more in this direction, I think they will start to suffer the costs as well.

Every search should not lead back to Google or its buddies. Once people think that they do, whether it’s true or not, Google changes. What was once looked at as a search engine will become a massive, searchable directory. And wasn’t the whole purpose of creating algorithm-based search engines to overcome the short-comings of editorially-selected directories?

Mark my words: this will cost Google several points in market share THIS year.

- Matt