An interesting phenomenon happens when one travels the Trans-Canada (Hwy1) east-bound between Banff and Calgary Alberta. (see Google Map)

As you round a corner forty kilometers east of Banff the mountains suddenly vanish and the vast North American prairies present a broadly flat but rolling landscape as far as the eyes can see. There may be a couple hills large enough to block the horizon but for the most part, everything forward is pancake flat.

That’s what the view looks like from Google’s vantage point today.

There are no boundaries to Google’s overall reach. When it comes to both organic search and paid contextual advertising opportunities for webmasters and businesses Google has built the best of all mousetraps, a molehill built up to become a mountain range.

The visual effect is even more stunning driving west into the Rocky Mountains from the central prairies. Just as you reach the current edge of Calgary’s sprawling suburbs, the full magnificence of the Rockies suddenly rises up before you. It is a dramatic and awe inspiring sight, a wall of enormous mountains looming above the flatlands as far as the eyes can see.

That’s how Google appears in relation to the rest of the search marketplace.

There are a few foothills obscuring Google’s limitless horizon the largest of which is Yahoo!. Yahoo! is in many ways outwardly similar to Google in that it serves an enormous paid-search advertising market and extremely strong organic search results. Constantly compared to Google, Yahoo! is often seen as a smaller, weaker entity than it really is.

A far larger and older company than Google, Yahoo! is a search-portal made up of thousands of satellite services, businesses, media and applications. Those satellites are loosely strung together under the Yahoo! banner though not always overtly branded to their parent company. Aside from search and email, Yahoo!’s most popular public service is probably the photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo! also owns MyBlogLog.

Though Yahoo!’s user-services are also connected through a universal user name and password, they do not feel as seamless as Google’s do. That’s likely because Yahoo! has traditionally monetized its services in a different manner than Google has, using a rich repository of display and banner advertising in place of contextually driven paid results.

SEOs think primarily about Google because the search-public uses it far more than any other search engine. Google has dominated the organic search market for the past five years with a market-share that rarely dips below 50%. Though better sets of search results can be fought for and found elsewhere, Google presents a lightning fast set of highly relevant listings every time. Internet users don’t talk about searching for information, they talk about “Googling it”, (much to the chagrin of Google’s lawyers).

Similarly, Google’s AdWords program offers savvy search-marketers a strong return on their advertising investment with an easily understood bidding mechanism and interface. They can also be reasonably sure ads placed through AdWords will reach a reasonable number of eyeballs because Google has the largest contextual ad distribution system on the Internet. It is moving into the display, audio and video markets as well. Recent acquisitions include the video-sharing site YouTube and display advertising provider Double Click.

Furthermore, Google has created several user-centric server-side products, each of which require user registration, and bound those products together into an online lifestyle services suite. Once a user is logged into one of Google’s services their universal registration acts as a passport for all Google services. The information (both public and private) Google is capable of collecting, indexing and utilizing is phenomenal.

The metaphor of foothills and mountain ranges is useful in that it illustrates the enormity of Google against its largest online advertising competitor, Yahoo!. There is gold under the foothills but there is even more in the mountains.

It should be noted this is a time of extraordinary seismic shifts in and around the Internet. Google rose to its position in part during the aftermath of the dot-com crash which was sort of an accelerated ice-age in the development of the Internet. At this time, Google’s got it going in virtually every sector with the exception of social media.

The rise of social media applications such as Facebook , Digg, or MySpace is creating a degree of disruptive energy around the search-sphere. Internet users are increasingly turning to social recommendations or video-search for information. Social media does not lend itself to the provision of contextual paid-search advertising as well as it does to display or banner advertising, hence Google’s purchase of Double Click and Yahoo!’s acquisition of Right Media.