I’m at PubCon South this week and have enjoyed listening to some of the top online marketing minds speak today. There are plenty of highlights and blogs that live blogged everything, but I was surprised, a little wary and very interested to watch 3 online marketing execs hold a session on The SEO Landscape.

The panel was Bill Hunt (Ogilvy search guru and CEO of their global division), Gillian Muessig (most recently President of SEOmoz) and Brett Tabke (CEO of Webmaster World, which sort of makes him camp counselor for PubCon too). These three really smart people had great presentations and spoke extemporaneously in some cases about the “The SEO Landscape”.

I commented to one later that I was surprised that Google was on every slide and consistently mentioned, yet no one spoke about Microsoft and Yahoo! was mentioned only in passing.

Stop.

These are three smart people.  They didn’t all miss out on the other search engines, and there are plenty of niche engines developing every day.  What they did was focus on Google at a level that was essentially exclusive.

The big search engine appears to have won the hearts and minds.

Microsoft may pull something out of a hat.  Yahoo! could leverage its content and come storming back and even Ask.com still gets more than 700 million queries each month. But they’re all after thoughts.

As our small businesses have been telling us for the past year, only Google matters in their eyes.   We still can mix in other advertising buys, but the focus is virtually all Google. I’m not enough of a philosopher or sociologist to know if that is a good or a bad development. I only know that at least one trio of search thought leaders unofficially declared the war’s over.