Google either puts other search engines out of business by sucking all of the air out of the room or by buying them out. In either case, they are simply looking after their own best interests, there is nothing inherently evil or bad about the way Google behaves in regards to other search engines. By no means is the search engine industry a monopoly–it’s easily accessible and there are literally hundreds of competitors. However, none of those competitors, save Bing and Yahoo, can claim to have large market shares, and even theres are large relative to all the others, not relative to Google overwhelming market share.

News that Google has bought another up-and-coming search engine isn’t really a surprise, or it shouldn’t be to anyone who follows Google’s business side. They have a savvy bunch at Google. Sparkbuy was the buy and it was a smart one. The big question is–what does it mean for online reputation management services? In the short term, nothing–Sparkbuy wasn’t a big deal yet. In the long-term, it could still mean nothing, or it could mean everything, it’s hard to say how this acquisition and the absorption of the Sparkbuy team will affect Google. Certainly Google has reason to breath easier–they have no online reputation problem to worry about when they continually dominate the search industry.

The International Business Times is a great online publication if you’re looking to keep track of the business world. Even the industry of online reputation management gets coverage.  In this article, The Pros and Cons of Reputation Management, the industry is weighed and measured and the author…well, just read it.

A similar pattern emerges in the relatively recent rise of online reputation management as an industry. Not restricted to the increasingly-saturated (and potentially outmoded) field of SEO, reputation management takes into consideration the overall visibility of its clients — most notably, in the area of third-party and user-generated content.

The reputation management services industry was created in response to the misuse of search engine results pages. Websites like Yelp and Ripoff Report are common problems for companies because they are controlled by anonymous reviewers with an agenda. Web savvy users are aware of the issue of online reputation, but many people still don’t understand the industry or how it works.

Over at Google’s official blog, there is a very helpful post about how to manage your online reputation using search results. That is, of course, what the search engine reputation management business is all about–so Google giving out some tips and guidelines is incredibly helpful. Too often in the industry, people focus on reactionary solutions, rather than pre-emptive solutions.

Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you’re publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don’t normally visit the site where you originally posted it.

If you don’t want everyone to know what you are posting online, then do not post it online. It’s as simple as that. That is just one of many helpful tips that the Google blog has to offer, and it’s a good one.

Politicians know more than their fair share about online reputation management. They are confronted with its effect on nearly a daily basis. Whether it’s their facebook page, twitter account, or just the blogosphere–politicians are under a sensitive radar watch that catches every single word they say and every single word that is said about them. It is hard to maintain a decent online reputation in the midst of all of that.

Potential candidates are hiring Internet scrubbers these days to clean up their online images before they even declare candidacy.

Online reputation management firms that already do big business in the corporate world are being hired by campaigns to monitor and manage candidates’ online brands. Integrity Defenders President Alan Assante said politicians, including state senators and members of Congress, now make up about 15 percent of the firm’s clients.

Politicians have taken to scrubbing their online histories, which is certainly the right way to go about things–but it is usually not very effective. The truth is, as far as politicians are concerned, that highly interested and qualified journalists are going to find the dirt if they are looking for it. Reputation Management Services, though, can make it so that the first links that people comes across aren’t so negative.