On the one hand, you hit the nail on the head that Google is the consummate black box in both their approach and human responsiveness. On the other, Fortune had a good article on how increasingly media companies are looking at Yahoo as a competitor. In the realm of long tail, this is probably less of an issue but it is suggestive of a chess board that is getting really interesting.

At the end of the day, the long tail community of consumers, producers, aggregators and filters benefits by having more competition in the space, and would expect to see enhancements on ability for consumers to set contextual preferences in addition to publishers. Plus, the next wave of this invariably involves better APIs for web app developers.