One good thing to come out of consolidation in the search space is the general realization that Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company with an excellent brand.
It is another advertising company, Overture, that has bought some of the main search engines, not the other way around.
Search technology is a commodity and subtleties like PageRank are icing on a cake that others have the recipe for. The main issue with search from a technical perspective is scalability and, as FAST has shown, Google is not the only one to have figured this out.