People are writing articles, participating in forums, creating signatures, doing thousands of things that they are not supposed to, just to get free internet traffic. Let's think about it for a moment.

First of all, search engines are the ones who give the assessment of the web sites and let them have free internet traffic by positioning them in accordance with their content usefulness. The site could have been created recently and have perfect content, but because of luck of links and their ages, they are stored in some 'sandboxes' until they obtain 'maturity' from the search engines prospective. This can take a while and is not right. A good search engine should be able to quickly get the real weight of content no matter how old the site is. The search engines do not have a lot of competition and sometimes there are not a lot of differences in results because the search algorithms used are similar. From the other hand, sometimes sites that held leading positions before disappear unexpectedly from the top of the search engines lists and this makes their webmasters start writing articles, creating links and doing tons of other things, instead of improving their site's content. In conclusion, web search engines need to improve their service quality and allow people to do whatever they can do the best: writers to write, webmaster to work on content and technical issues and not to eat into each other's bread. We need more versatile search engines, in quantity and quality, than we have now.

But right now all we have is one dominating search engine ' Google, another one - Yahoo - gradually loosing it's share to Google, and MSN, desperately trying to obtain a leading role in internet marketing. The share of other search engines is insignificant and is not rising. All three represent the US. Under these conditions, obtaining free internet traffic is getting increasingly difficult for small companies without big resources. It would be ideal to have 5 - 6 search engines with approximately equal market share , competing and having different ways of calculating the web sites hierarchy in their organic part. This would increase chances for the small companies of getting free internet traffic and make it more stable. In the worst case, if a website gets "slapped" by one search engine, it would sustain their positions against other engines. As I said, all the major search engines represent the US right now. What about the other countries?

Recently France was permitted by EU to invest in elaboration of the new European search engine Quaero (The Google Assassin). The French Government plans to invest 99 million Euros ($154 million) in JV, where 23 companies will participate, including Thomson Financial. The Whole project will cost 199 million Euros ($310 million). The goal is to provide not only excellent search capabilities, but also recognition of speech, images, texts translation, video segmentation, texts indexation and many more. This project was originally planned in 2004 as a French ' German JV and devoted to the creation of the competitor of the American leading search engines ' Google and Yahoo. But later this project was divided by two independent projects: Quaero and Theseus. Their main goal is still the same: the creation of a powerful search engine. The EU law prohibits Governments of the countries ' members of the EU from investing in any private companies if it threatens a fair competition between them, but this particular case is presented as an exception, where prospective results would far outpace the consequences of the antimonopoly law. Let's hope that this will increase the competition and make free internet traffic easier to get.