Although SEOmoz tends to report on only those items that directly influence optimization practices, the re-emergence of the search wars between Yahoo!, MSN & Google has resulted in a lot of recent press. One article, from the New York Times, entitled - Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up - makes Google out to be ripe for the picking.

Google's representative, when pressed on why Google has lagged in innovation over the past 12 months, had this to say:

"There is more creativity involved in our process here," she said. "And isn't that more fun and more interesting?"

Yahoo! & MSN on the other hand appear to have clear goals, ambitions and received positive press regarding their own innovations and progress. For SEOs, this battle means that ignoring the small search engines, even bit players like A9 and AskJeeves/Teoma would be a bad idea. After all, switching your search engine is far easier than dealing with sub-par results.