Don’t laugh — but that’s the meme that’s kind of floating around, since Allen from CenterNetworks proposed how he might orchestrate it, with Read/Write/Web chiming in with their three cents.

Don’t get me wrong: making some strategic moves makes sense if you’re content to be the third fiddle (or fourth, or fifth) to Google’s chief fiddler (or, for the comic book geeks out there, let’s say Firelord, to Google’s Galactus). I think it would be smart to pay Firefox, for example, to make Ask.com its default search. Or, for that matter, starting a price war when it comes to contextual advertising.

Heck, as a blogger and publisher I would *welcome* the latter.

But let’s be honest here.

Google owns one thing that Ask will never have.

Or, something that Yahoo will never reclaim.

Or, that Microsoft will never be able to buy.

And that’s the “mindshare” of Internet users world wide for what “Search” means. Heck, for the minds of some people, Google *IS* the Internet. And let’s not get into its forays into web applications, dark fibre, data centers and the like.

When most people think “Search”, or what to query anything, they think of Google. And now that Google’s been in that position for so many years, it will take more than strategic maneuverings, no matter how slick, subtle, or expensive they might be, to change that.

The kinds of changes that Ask.com is trying to implement are tactical at best, but even the smartest strategic maneuverings would never do more than advertise and bring attention to what Ask.com is — and that is a Search Engine like Google.com

Leapfrogging over Google would take some massive kind of shift in what Search means, something hugely disruptive and innovative. Is *that* what’s going on at Ask.com? Maybe it is, but I haven’t heard anything about it. I mean, sure they’re changing algorithms, apparently.

Whoop-de-frackin’-doo.

Let’s say you could prove that Ask.com is a better search tool than Google, well, what then?

It still wouldn’t be good enough. Business history is littered with examples of poorer technologies that still took and never relinquished the lead even when better products or technologies existed. The Qwerty keyboard. Microsoft.

I could go on.

Do I think Ask.com could topple Google? Of course not. Could it improve its share of the search engine market with aggressive marketing and wiley strategic partnerships? Sure. But how much of the pie are they eventually going to get? And are they going to be happy with that tiny sliver of a slice? Will it be a curve of decreasing marketing returns?

But will investors ever be happy being the runty animal in the search engine family?

My feeling is probably no.

Will Ask.com have the intestinal fortitude to introduce something really game changing rather than settling for throwing marketing cash at a problem that money can’t solve? (Because let’s face it — if money *COULD* solve it, Microsoft would have already done it)

Again — my feeling is probably not.

But you know what? It could. So why doesn’t it?