A nice update on the Lookout acquisition -

Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Lookout, Software!  Interesting note on Searching as a programmable platform at the end of the post.   
 
I think of search as the outer layer of the Web as a platform.  On a related note, here is an interesting post about using Google as the query layer on the WWW.  The idea is to have a GQL,  GQL = Google Query Language, where you would use Google as the query language to get answers from the WWW just as you would SQL to get answers from a DB.