Where are all the Google Competitors?

Ben had an interesting post about Google's continued dominance of the search market. With Google grabbing 90% share of all growth volume how are the nearest competitors doing? Yahoo is losing share and Microsoft has gained a moderate amount of share (Microsoft Live Search is now at about 8.5% market share).

My question is: Where are all the Google competitors? Has Google search become so omnipotent that competitors have stopped trying? Many believe the key to search success is ever present search (search where you want it when you want it). With Android, Google is beginning to make strides in the phone search market, however how can phone manufacturers and their OS makers stand by and let this happen? To me the larger market players (RIM, Apple, and Windows Mobile) are in the perfect position to stall Google in the mobile search market by embedding search in the phone operating systems in a more integrated way. As it stands now, mobile search and the web browsing experience has typically been a development afterthought but a mobile experience built from the ground up on a web based platform has the the potential to stop Google dead in its tracks.

The same goes for the PC web browsing and search experience. As it stands now, web search on the PC is again largely an add-on experience. MSFT is in perfect position, to make the web search experience a more of a natural part of the PC (and even platform gaming) experience. Ahh but here's the rub... the words bundling and integrated experience makes Microsoft very weary because everytime those words are brought up, memories of anti-trust suits come racing back. So while Microsoft is well positioned from a multi-platform perpective, their history in tech competition makes these types of cross platform initiatives challenging. Has the Justice department inadvertently inhibited competition in the search space? Given Google's reach into the phone hardware and PC browser space will the Justice department ever come knocking?

Ok so maybe given all its problems maybe Microsoft will never catch up? Anyone else? Hey.... ten years ago everyone thought AltaVista was the end all be all of search.