google in a tight noose?

is there a tight noose on google lately? yahoo is already coming up with new ideas in an effort to bring the developer community together under its name, and msn is trying hard to get its new msn search to compete with google.
yahoo announced its yahoo search developer network (ysdn <--> msdn?). i remember google coming up with their web api's some time back (> a year i guess), but this time yahoo has come up with something more than just text search. now you can search for multimedia objects like videos & images. russ cranked out a small jsp to search on the video catalog using the yahoo api's. it looks like a good step towards some new ideas in the search engine landscape after google maps.