[azakai]

> If Bing were to overtake Google and become the preferred search engine, would anything really be much different?

No one wants that (except Microsoft).

What we want is for Bing or something else to bring more balance to the search market. Today Google is so dominant that people SEO specifically for it, and Google decides what is and isn't ok to do, and can then decimate site's traffic based on that (as we saw with Rockstar in a recent example).

But if there were several successful search engines with no single dominant winner, things would be better. SEO would matter less because you would need to optimize for multiple targets, so you would get away with less tricks (or you need to work much harder to trick everyone, again with the result of less trickery). And no single company could decide the fate of every other company that needs to get traffic through web searches, which is what we have now.