ByronM - 12:20 pm on Jun 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

I do not see how this would affect competition. Anyone could set up a search engine and an ad serving platform tomorrow and if they provide a good service then everyone would switch straight away. It is not like you are locked in or there are unnatural barriers to entry.

False.. the day and age of whizbangery financial wheeling and deeling to make it so just isn't there. The bar is set SO high that you need a 10 billion dollar company to compete or even attempt to compete against google.

The day and age of "Searching 100 million pages" is gone. I can do that on a small cluster of PC's running nutch. Hell, i've attempted to do it on the billions of pages but people are so ingraned to google it didn't get any traffic or traction. (mostly because i couldn't offer them money like google does)

A federalized search where webmasters are compensated and allowed control over their corpus may be the next best thing in search, but another google will never happen.