Let's face it, Google is the best search engine hands down. I love it, you love it... and the only reason that we might use something else like Yahoo or Dogpile is if we just absolutely cannot find what we are looking for on Google.

It's no mystery that Google, Yahoo and MSN are all huge competitors, with Cuil being the newest addition (read the press release here). Cuil has constantly been referred to as the "Google Killer." Just try Googling "google killer" and take a look at the very first natural result ;). It even asks you if you'd like to "See results for cuil". The only one problem with these tools is that there is not enough human interaction. Their ranking systems are good, but only good to a point. It would be daunting and I suppose downright impossible for employees to approve every single website submitted or crawled.

This doesn't mean that there is nothing that we can do to better Google for everyone. Sites like Wikipedia, DMOZ and eHow (just to name a few) have already made a huge dent in the quality of Google's results. Most recently hengine has debuted and is trying to get in the game of contributing to Google. What all of these websites have in common is that they are human generated (not crawled) and human-filtered for quality. These websites don't intend on competing with Google, they're about helping people and bettering the internet.

So in a sense, Google does have another layer of quality assurance besides PageRank, and it's the human element from contributing websites. In our own goal of submitting our websites to contributors for our own SEO and marketing purposes, especially the highly regarded DMOZ directory, we are in fact contributing to Google and making the internet better, but we can certainly do more.

There is another side that's more than meets the eye. Some people believe that Google has a much larger future. I am of course talking about the Google Operating System that will essentially be fully virtual or online. Google has been around for a long time now and they are GROWING, getting smarter, building more storage and getting faster. Read more here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ and http://www.kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system.

Google tracks the way we search, the way we surf, the way we shop, the way we socialize, etc. They have a mountain of knowledge. Quite honestly, if Google doesn't share information with the government then they probably have a better understanding of human behavior/patterns than the government.

Google's Biggest Competitors:

Quite honestly, this might not be Yahoo or MSN at all, but Windows and Macintosh Operating Systems.

Google's Biggest Contributors:

You, me, everyone. Every time you or I use Google or any Google service, they're tracking extensively as much as they can. Knowledge is power.

Besides other obvious competitors (Ask, AOL, etc.), I would love to hear more about fairly unknown competitors and contributors and your feelings and thoughts about the future of Google and what I believe to be very important: its human interaction.