Perhaps. Let us play it out; Suppose sites like Hipmunk succumb to the siren song and do the microformat dance like Google wants in order to show up as a fancy

Perhaps. Let us play it out; Suppose sites like Hipmunk succumb to the siren song and do the microformat dance like Google wants in order to show up as a fancy card/wizard in the results -- and eventually Google swaps them out for identical ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software) / Knowledge Graph / 'etc sourced ones, thus killing Hipmunk. 1) Antitrust lawsuits will surely happen. Perhaps at that point Google is so big and adept at playing this game so.. 2) Inevitable overhead from being a large bureaucratic corporation leaves enough margin for the Hipmunks of the world to exist outside this ecosystem and still be used by prosumers. Which leads to a comeback of the old-timey Google styled search engines whose value proposition is to float such sources fairly in its results. With the margin being big enough they will gain popularity for the same reasons Google itself initially did. Edit: Walled Gardens can hold, but only for awhile as 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy' always applies.