The name Google has become so synonymous with the idea of a
digital query, that the company's name was incorporated as a
verb into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. But though
Google still holds a 68 percent share of digital searches,
chinks in the Palo-Alto behemoth's armor have been begun to
show. The New York Times just published a huge report on JC
Penney's gaming of the engine's algorithms over the holiday
season to boost their ranking to the top of many searches.
Meanwhile, Facebook continues to surge as a possible competitor
for overall web power, gathering ever more details about its 
users. And news continues to trickle in about Bing's rising
marketshare, too. Then there's Jeffrey F. Rayport's assertion in
the most recent Business Week that Google's very conception of
an all-encompassing search--an idea that many share about the
nature of online searches--and of search engines as omni-portals
into many digital worlds might be outdated. Here are three areas
in which Google may finally be beginnin