[bryanrasmussen]

>Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention?

different Search engines with different rules and so forth would lessen the benefit of the O part, because it seems unlikely you could efficiently optimize for every particular algorithm and ruleset.

Perhaps SEO is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine and also made worse by that search engine not really giving a shit about making its search work that well for years and years but only about how many ads they could push at people and how much they could charge for those ads.

[RavlaAlvar]

I agree with your assessment that maybe this is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine.

But I would argue one big search engine is unavoidable since no one would want to use the second best search engine.

Google search didn’t come the best because the other service like mail map and YouTube. So breaking up Google does nothing to stop google search from being the monopoly it is today.

[stvltvs]

If different search engines optimized for different niches, there would be an user base for "second best" search engines. For example, nothing beats Bing for porn search.