JS_Harris - 9:07 am on Feb 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

And to think that MSFT at some point offered Yahoo over $40 Billion! Search was the key, the rest of the Y! content is largely duplicated by msn.com

The majority of the content provided by all search engines is duplicated, some of it even scraped from blogs and friend of a friend type sites nobody's heard of before.

A sobering thought, are we headed to a future where there is only one major engine and it decides to provide its own content instead of ranking 3rd party sites? The face of the net would be changed, for a while at least, until new engines spring up that don't ignore 3rd party sites.

I believe law should force browsers to offer an easy way for the end user to pick which search company they want to use and make it easy to switch at any time. When installing a browser there should be no default and instead just a list of options that includes all search companies.

I'd also like to see a major search company that's not on Wall st and is run by someone only interested in the health of the net and not the companies pocketbook but alas...