Okay, here's yet another idea. There is no way that Ask, Microsoft, or Yahoo can beat Google together. But what if they teamed up? In the end if any two or more of the major or minor players in the game were to team up to produce a powerful search engine that can go toe to toe with Google's offering than the search engine game would be over as a differentiator. If you take that away from Google it seriously hurts their business model which requires dominance of the search engine field. To get users to pull away from Google is not easy unless your product actually is as good or better and then not to mention the geek community push that any consolidate effort with goodies that they can play with. Google is coming up fast against pretty much everyone online. Their ideal is to control users and lock them in to Google products on pretty much every front, which is dangerous for the internet. Pretty much any move that diverts traffic from Google is a positive for any of the other players on the net, and even if the money isn't going directly to their pockets, they should still be interested in preventing it from going to Google.