We've recently had the latest instalment of the Google Panda Update which is an update to way the Search Engine ranks websites, and decides who will display where in it's search results.
An interesting side affect of the latest update was reports of American Digital Coupon retailer "Retail Me Not" getting hammered and losing a subsequent amount of key word rankings and search traffic, which was picked up by the likes of Search Engine Land.
This then led to a PR damage limitation exercise: Full Press Release
"RetailMeNot, Inc. wanted to take this opportunity to respond to recent articles about RetailMeNot.com's keyword performance on Google.
The company believes these reports greatly overstate the impact on RetailMeNot.com"
In response to the news, the stock price of the company has apparently fallen by 18.%.
So a bit of a code update, upload it, and boom huge companies lose market share, stock prices crash 
The official motto of Google is "Don't Be Evil" although this is downplayed a bit these days.
I doubt very many of us don't utilise Google in some shape or form, from business tools, generating leads, revenue generation, email or just doing a good old search. There is no questioning some of the good they do, countless good causes and projects, pushing the bounds of technology. But they also get a good share of flak, from privacy concerns, a bullish "our way or the highway" attitude or accusations of monopoly or cartel style practices.
I think there is an easy solution to this, to keep concerns in check, but continue to stimulate development. It's called competition!
If there was a viable competitor to Google, then I think we would see a much less bullish attitude, especially when it comes to search engine updates or changing policies. Plus they can't be accused of a monopoly just because there isn't any other competition!
So where is Bing, Yahoo, Ask or any other bit player in the search engine market? Come on lets have some competition 
Why can't Microsoft (the owners of Bing) get a serious foot hold in the search engine market? Is it Google is just much better than Bing, or is just a branding issue?
You would think with Microsofts resources they could become a serious contender, so I wonder what the issue is? I'll confess to being a Google Chrome user, with Google as my default search. I've never been a fan of Microsofts Internet Explorer Browser, so maybe this clouds my judgement of Bing? I've tried Bing, seems to work perfectly fine and is comparable to Google, but I always default back to Google. Why?
Has anyone been impacted by recent Google updates? I'm not talking about Harry the spammer who deserves to be switched off, but genuine business owners following what they thought were the rules, or maybe have outsourced to some dodgy SEO firm, and are now paying the price?
Has anyone seen their web traffic increase as a result of the Google updates, and are more than happy? Or do we have any die hard Bing, Yahoo or other search engine users?
You think a small biz can buck the trend? Get anew job lol
