This quote says it very well:

'Mr. McAndrews contends that search engines, which long have claimed credit for sending people to companies’ Web sites, do not deserve it all.

“Google gets all the credit, and in fact, you might have just gone to Google to type in the U.R.L.,” Mr. McAndrews said, pointing out that people often search for companies’ names after seeing their ads elsewhere.'

I can attest that many, many people open their web browser and type URLs into the search bar, or the search engine set as their home page. We get email all the time from readers of Computeractive telling us that our links are broken, and usually it's because the links we put out are too fresh to have been indexed by their search engine of choice. These aren't daft people, either - they're intelligent and articulate. perhaps it's a sign that we rely on search engine put in front of us too much.

Should aQuantive's method prove successful, however, there might be one side-effect. Many organisations rely on revenue from search engines - for example, the Mozilla foundation gets a big chunk of cash from Google, as readers happily use the search bar in the Firefox browser, or in the Firefox homepage, to search. A win this way would most certainly put the hurt on some of Microsoft's most successful antagonists.

Regardless, McAndrews has a very good point to make, and there's mroe than a grain of truth in his assertion. One can only wonder if this latest punt from Microsoft will go between the posts, or whether it'll be this years' chcoclate brown, DRM-crippled music player.