When Danny Sullivan speaks, the search industry listens. The search pioneer gave an intriguing keynote speech at SMX West in which he compared the three major search engines to his kids. In this video, Danny explains how he has unconditional love for his children even when they disappoint him. The same idea is present with the search engines because he still loves and uses them even though they disappoint him also.

The main reason for this analogy was to discuss ways Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft could improve. Although Google statistics show that they hold between 60-70 percent of search share, the company still has areas it can expand on. A few of these areas include video search, image search, and map spam issues.

According to Danny, Yahoo has shown weakness in the areas of leadership. He points out that the company does have factors working in their favor such as SearchMonkey and Search Pad, but he encourages them to keep innovating. On the subject of Yahoo search, Danny said this in his keynote:

“We know that they [Microsoft] want it [Yahoo] and we know they’re [Microsoft] going to get it [Yahoo].”

Last but not least, Danny discusses Microsoft. He polled the audience and interestingly enough, nearly every hand went up when asked if they wanted Microsoft to succeed. People want to see Google have a competitor and actually, Google needs a competitor to stay on the right path. Danny says that Microsoft needs to pick a brand and let people know that they love search.

Danny also revealed opportunities that all the search engines could capitalize on, which could put them ahead of Google. These opportunities include real-time/Twitter search and mobile applications.

While embracing these areas would offer great advancement to other search engines, Danny does not predict that we’ll see a Google killer within the next three years. He said we could see small “killerettes” but no official Google killer.