Recently we have been taking a close look at the search engine industry. We have been taking a look at what is left of the "independent" search engines that were many some years ago and if there are any new players in the industry. It is staggering to browse through resource after resource and discover how few are left and how colored the entire Web search industry is with the major three search engines.

At the same time there are discussions all over about the new trends, social networks, social bookmarks and the whole bunch. Even though some of the new services are owned by the large search engine companies this new trend is not yet touched deeply with search or related services such as PPC. This could be changing as the is word out that Google, the company we all admire and would love to own a piece of, is getting ready to dig deep into the core of social networks.

How charming will it be too see all the inhabitants of the social networks start fighting with each other for the valuable clicks on their ads? Things could start to get very exciting in the personal spaces when virtual friends start to compete with one another for the clicks and a powerful group, called Web marketers, will arrive to compete for the friendship of their friends. A friendship and groups of friends could get a price tag and sold to the highest bidders just like the clicks. Let’s just hope cyber friends will continue to be friends and not sold to the highest bidder and let’s just hope the social networks will not be affected as deeply with “friendspam” as the search engines are with link spam.