Sorry, I hate to be that guy and keep arguing, but I'll just say google does not fit here at all because: 1. there are huge up-front costs and a lot of IP to building a competing search engine (not the case here)

2. google is a consumer company where brand and user behavior are important (not the case here).

3. most importantly, they make their money with an ad network which has network effects and where they charge enormous margins

you'll notice in all the discussions between yhoo/msft the most important thing for both companies is their ownership share of the search ad network. this is key to the bottom line and long term relevance and its why you see proposals along the lines of we'll give you a bunch of money and a guarantee of a portion of revenues in exchange for ownership of your network

The point on rising above infrastructure only applies if they begin adding some sort of ip or secret sauce. Then they can get network effects if they have people building on a platform that is not easy to replicate, but we've seen nothing like that. Hadoop is not that.

You can install hadoop on your own machine today if you want: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/quickstart.html

I understand thats harder and thats why consumers are using them, but its not hard in the sense of competing business.

In fact most large web companies _already_ do all of this stuff internally.