Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Nick Carr suggests that Google offer users a choice:

If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals - to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search - it should open up its home page to other search engines. That would be easy to do without mucking up the page or the "user experience." You could just add a simple drop down menu that would allow users to choose whether to do a search with Google's engine, or Microsoft's, or Yahoo's, or one of the other, less-well-known engines that now exist.

I notice that he isn't suggesting that Microsoft offer to sell other companies' products on their home page. Because that amounts to pretty much the same idea.