Google has established itself as one of the most, if not the best and most popular, search engine in modern day life. It is considered the best as it has the most views and web pages of all the other search engines on the market including Yahoo and Ask. In fact, this is the one search engine that most search engine optimisation companies concern themselves with.

Over the life of today's students, this search engine has influenced them in many ways and this is why it is so powerful in everyday life. Due to modern technology, Google can allow anyone to search literally anything on the internet from the latest news to buying houses. This means that every person's needs can be found on the internet. Big money is made through search engine optimisation companies preparing sites for Googlebots.

But to stay useful to everyone, search engines need to be updated on a regular basis otherwise all the information shown will be out of date and therefore be useless. At first, Google owned the search engine market with no straight competitors but this has changed due to Yahoo and Ask spending some time and money in improving and entering the same market.

Student James Parker had this to say: "In my personal experience Google has helped with a number of things and I only ever surf the internet using this facility. This is because I find the other search engines different and harder to use, as well as not as many relevant results showing up. But I assume this is all because I have only have ever used Google since I first went on the internet and have only spent a short amount of time using the other search engines.

"The most important aspect of my life that this search engine has helped me with is my coursework, projects that I encountered during my last year at school. I managed to find all the information I needed for all my work very easily and never had to retreat to a book or an encyclopaedia.

"This is down to using the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, on the internet through Google. This stored all the information necessary that I needed and it was the single most important information website that I used. I also used it for my coursework to attain pictures that I needed that were necessary to my work. I found this very easy as all I needed to do was type in the necessary keywords and use the sites image search."

Overall, it seems that Google will be top for search engines and it looks like none of their rivals will be able to overtake them as the biggest and best search engine available to the public to search the internet. To that end, search engine optimisation companies know where they stand.

That said, in recent months a company has popped up out of the market and made a bold statement. It is a company called Cuil (pronounced Cool) and it was set up by some ex Google employees that wanted to set up their own rival business. They claim that they have already received far more page requests than Google in the short time they have been active and hope to attain the prize of being the best search engine in the market soon.

A key feature to this new search engine is the fact that it organises the search results you have typed in to a number of different categories so you can easily find the thing you are looking for. For example, if you typed in cat, the search results will be organised into the different categories such as Cat Food, Cat accessories and so on. It will be interesting to see in the future whether Cuil will give Google a run for its money or indeed, take over as the most popular search engine.