It's common for people to enter a new year with a resolution, but this year, I thought I'd try something entirely new (and probably overflowing with hubris) and assign New Year's resolutions to the big players in the search market. Thus, without further ado...

Google should resolve to:

• Build more search demand with the money they've amassed. At 70-75% of market share, their focus in engineering should be, jointly, on improving quality (which is already very high) and continuing to experiment with new ideas for the SERPs (and beyond). More importantly, though, is to make search an even more essential part of life - and second nature to more of the human race. I still know plenty of tech savvy folks who don't instantly think "I should search for that" when questions arise. Through marketing, advertising, or other creative outlets, Google should work to capture those minds.
• Clone Matt Cutts and find others like him. Matt does a brilliant job of representing Google to an exceptionally antagonistic community. Google's other products need their own Matt and web search needs another dozen of him. My advice would be to select individuals who are already cut out for the work, rather than hiring public relations experts and sending them through press training - that's not the way Google should want to be perceived, and it could hurt them in the long run to craft their image rather than remain au natural. Oh yeah - and get them to blog and comment as openly and candidly as Matt does.
• End the paid links debate of 2007 by responding to all the issues with a few sentences. Something like

Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you'd prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google's rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties, or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.), we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we'd prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that's just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we're not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don't think are valuable to the ranking algorithms.

Yahoo! should resolve to:

• Win back searcher's hearts and minds through advertising, branding, guerrilla marketing, and creativity. Their search is nearly as good as Google's for 80%+ of queries and probably better for a fair 10% (the other 10% is considerably worse, but that's for engineering to handle). They need their users to start thinking about them as a search destination again. Create a story and make it resonate - make it compelling. Make it so my grandmother hears about it from her friends, not just her TV.
• Take a bold leap with blended search, possibly along the lines of what Ask 3D has done. Remind us that YouTube isn't the only video site on the web and that Flickr really is the best image search out there.
• Buy Yelp or CitySearch and make Yahoo! local a superior product to what Google has. it's not that much of a challenge, but it will be if you wait too long.
• Buy Technorati and make a Yahoo! blog search that's better than Google's. Once again, it's not hard to do now, but when Google turns their energy towards blog search, it will pay to be a few steps ahead.

Microsoft should resolve to:

• Let Live/MSN Search loose from Microsoft corporate. Build the division the same way you built Xbox - as a completely separate company of innovators and fresh minds. Don't let the Microsoft hierarchy or corporate structure or even the aesthetics overlap. Just let it sink or swim on its own (with lots of funding, of course).
• Spend double the marketing and advertising budget (whatever that may be) on engineering. The product itself is still so far behind that it's not usable. Yes, there have been tremendous leaps, particularly in the last 6 months, but no matter what the user survey satisfaction numbers are saying, the relevance still isn't up to Yahoo!'s and Google's. Advertising and contests earned you a little bit of extra share and plenty of extra searches in 2007, but you're a long-term kinda company, so think long term. Invest in the product quality now and market it later. Or heck, do both - you're sitting on a mountain of cash reserves and it's hard to imagine a project with more potential return.
• Change the name back to MSN. It's one of the most recognized brands on the planet - I love that Live was going to be something completely new, but there's still time to re-brand without losing anything.

Ask should resolve to:

• Get a crawl rate and index size similar to Google's. It's hard to tell how good their algorithms and vertical integration is with such a small slice of the pie. The rumor that Ask hand-approves websites runs rampant in the SEO community - end it by investing in the hardware and the people to make a truly competitive index.
• Make an iPhone-like interface. As the search company with the greatest ability to innovate the results page, go for broke and make something so inspiring to use that every tech geek in the world can't wait to show it off. BTW - A good place to start is by making a gorgeous mobile search interface for the iPhone itself. Capturing those early adopters worked for Google, and it can work for you.

p.s. Credit where credit is due - this post was actually Mystery Guest's idea. Thanks angel, it's really tough getting back on the blog bandwagon after so much time off :)

p.p.s. Happy New Year!