Swanson - 11:00 pm on Oct 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have it on good authority that the change has been requested by Google so that Ask can maintain a good quality score for it's arbitrage on Adwords.

I know it sounds like conspiracy theory but seriously this is a VERY good source.

You do know that Ask.com gets a huge amount of traffic from arbitrage on Adwords - it is as big a player as Ebay. Take away arbitrage and Ask.com is as big as Mirago.