With Google at the top of the search engine heap, there’s about a story a month of a potential Google-killer. But the reality of the matter is, and what Google-Killer-Of-The-Week Cuil showed us the other day, it’s going to take a lot to take on Sergey and Brin.

What Cuil’s biggest problem was – as Jason Lee Miller wrote, it’s one that other search engine competitors have all had – is not that their search algorithm or even indexing ability is bad, it’s that they can’t scale the way Google has been able to. Unless you have, say, Microsoft money, being able to handle the petabytes of data Google processes on an hourly basis.

What does that mean for us out here, businesses looking to be found, customers looking to find, and we obsessive web geeks?

Well, not much, really. Cuil isn’t all bad – it has a larger index than Google and its tile-based search results are pretty nifty, but search results aren’t always perfect (funny case in point: search “cuil debut disaster” on cuil. As of today, the results are, well, interesting).

That’s the problem with many “Google-Killers” – the new things they bring to the party are neat, but not enough to unseat the firmly entrenched Google, who have not yet lost their place as pace-setter for the industry.

That means, for the time being, Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo and MSN Live Search, are the standards for SEO. That’s obvious, but with new players getting the hype, it’s almost reassuring to know there is the SEO rock that is Google.

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