But they AREN'T insuring themselves against this. The mantra is: "Anyone can modify the code because it's open source". With regard to all these other search e

But they AREN'T insuring themselves against this. The mantra is: "Anyone can modify the code because it's open source". With regard to all these other search engines, I find it hard to take them seriously. If all these specialized searches were so awesome, they would've been pushed to a larger market (the web) so that these companies could leverage it as Google has done. Are you suggesting that Sprint would lock its users into crappy SprintSearch and not use Google if Google didn't make Android to put on one of Sprint's phones? I think that's a possibility. But I feel that market forces would eventually force phone service providers and manufacturers to use the best search possible (or at least an almost as good version) or consumers would leave them.