Not true. Google has lots of competition. Do you consider Yahoo and Microsoft no competition? Yahoo spent hundreds of millions buying Altavista, Alltheweb, and Looksmart and have poured countless tens of millions more into improving their own search tools. MSN has also spent countless tens of millions of dollars trying to improve their search engine. How about ask.com which spends a lot of money on advertising and research? Do you even know about the dozens of start ups that are trying to prove their new algorithms are better then Google's. The competition in search is fierce.

They also are the most powerful search engine, period. And rightly so. They have focused on search since the day the launched and have a huge headstart (years) over their competition. That's why they are number 1 in search.

Yes. Why wouldn't they? It would be difficult to do because you are competing with billions of other web pages but you can do it.

Based on your post I am going to assume you are trying to insinuate that Google is trying to force users to use their paid services to make money. This is a paranoid delusion of the unsuccessful. Ranking well in Google is not something that happens quickly or easily and it shouldn't. If billions of pages have existed before you launched yours why should yours suddenly be ranked number one? Or even well? You have to prove that your pages are worthy of it and that takes time. If your content is good it will eventually happen. If it is not, then it won't and that's how it is supposed to work.

Sorry you feel that way, it was basically a question. When I stated "buy or use any of google's services" I meant the free one's too. I wasn't trying to insinuate anything. How come a lot of posters always complain about their google ranking? That is what I meant by slim competition. Tons of threads start out " my ranking on msn and yahoo are better than google" and then the enevitable "why?". I'm not that far in the game and I would not expect any ranking in google.
I personally never assume anything because of the old analogy associated with the word. Thanks for the reply.

Because Google sends the most traffic. Naturally anyone would want to rank well in the search engine that delivers the most traffic.

Because most people don't realize that you have to have a good site to rank well in Google. MSN and Yahoo are years behind and poor sites will rank well and faster as a result. But in Google high rankings takes time and a lot of work. The vast majority of people who ask those questions don't spend that time or do that work.

Also, there are plenty of threads that say the opposite, that they rank well in Google but not in MSN or Yahoo. The reason is obvious: They have different algorithms. What works in one may not work in the others. So one site that looks good to Google may not look good to Yahoo. It is very rare to find a site hat performs well in all three major search engines.