Interesting. Whenever I hear discussions of these sorts of things they're made out as basically swapping plugins -- Site X will now use Site Y's search algorith

Interesting. Whenever I hear discussions of these sorts of things they're made out as basically swapping plugins -- Site X will now use Site Y's search algorithms, index, etc. instead of their own. If it truly is a melding that could result in better search results in aggregate, I like the idea that someone (or someones) could actually compete with Google.