With all the talk about Microsoft and it’s off-again, on-again talks with Yahoo! it is easy to forget that in the search engine world there is a single major player called Google and it is so far ahead of the game that rivals cannot even begin to imagine what they have to do in order to catch-up.

Google is clearly a redshift company not just using existing technology but challenging itself to create solutions for problems that appear insurmountable and find ways to do it before anyone else.

Just how exotic the company really is was glimpsed at the Google I/O conference where Google Fellow, Jeff Dean, explained a little of how the company tackles hardware failures across a server base that numbers over 200,000 servers and grows daily and 36 data centres which can be found using GoogleMaps.

While the conference threw a little light at the way Google datacentres actually work what it did, more than anything else, was to highlight just how different is the company’s approach to search from any of its rivals.

Microsoft and Yahoo! may eventually partner up, or Yahoo! may find shelter in AOL and Microsoft may pour huge amounts of money into developing its own search business. The success of all these ventures, given enough time and money is likely to be better than critics expect. The clear message however is that no matter how successful they are they are unlikely to beat their massive rival without also managing to change their business culture which affects the way they tackle everything, from online advertising development to the search business itself.

This means that for the foreseeable future if you really want your online business to succeed you simply cannot ignore optimising your site for Google first and everyone else second.