Perhaps you should think back to about 1996 when search on Altavista and Ask Jeeves consisted of short tailed queries and searching manually through pages and pages of results before you found anything that made sense for what you are looking for. At the time, even that seemed a whole lot better than what we were used to.

Google changed all that. The Google algorithm actually seemed to understand what we had in mind. In fact, no one ever needed to ever go past the first page - a miracle in itself.  But is Google still overwhelmingly popular for reasons of the superiority of its search results?

Other large companies, Yahoo and Microsoft have been gunning for Google's level of search relevance for years. Surely, since they have access to all the talent in the world, they've managed to raise their accuracy levels to those promised by Google?

Why, about four years ago, PC World actually said that other search engines delivered better results. And that was four years ago. That shootout tied Google with Yahoo Search. And the old warhorse that's been around since the birth of the Internet, Alta Vista beat Google out.

The other one that beat Google out was AlltheWeb. Still, most people still use Google as their exclusive search engine. They might head over to Bing for better images; but for everything else, it's Google they want. Why do they do this? Is it that they are just used to Google and don't feel like changing?

The word on the street is, Google truly is popular for its brand reputation. It's quite clear now that the Google algorithm has been matched and its accuracy improved upon in some cases. So what should SEO experts do now?

Ever since the job of SEO came about, Google has been the only search engine out there. Perhaps it's time for a major shift in philosophy. Perhaps it's time for SEO experts to switch allegiance to Facebook instead - the new gatekeepers of the Internet. Or will something like Quora take over the world?

The biggest surprise in all of this is that the search engines that took first and second place - AltaVista and AlltheWeb are ones that many people know of. And yet, search accuracy isn't really getting those search engines anywhere in the popularity contests. People still can't stop talking about Google. It's time to rethink our priorities.