The idea of attack ads against Google — though poorly executed by Ask — isn't a bad one. On television, for instance, what does a network do when confronted by a competitor's blockbuster? It counter-programs, by running, for instance, a rom-com against the Superbowl. How did Fox News break into the TV news club? By breaking the rules, damning them for pomposity and hypocrisy, and appealing to the crotchety conservatives who yell at the television when Dan Rather shows up. And that's exactly the way to take on Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search engine is so powerful, so alien, so un-American, that it makes an easy target.Try these storylines:

• How come Google kowtows to communist China, America's biggest rival, while denying the national security needs of its own country?
• Did you know Eric Schmidt, Google's billionaire CEO, pays tax at a lower rate than the American workers he's hired on to sweep the floors of a North Carolina server farm?
• Or that the fabulously profitable search engine will pay less tax than the furniture factory that used to employ them?
• Google treats machines with more respect than it affords to people who didn't finish high school.
• And where's all the money going? To fund a "party plane" for the company's drag-queen Russian-born founder, and the "partner" with whom he still shares an office and god-knows-what-else.
• And have you seen some of the sick sites, and groups, that Google promotes? Pedophiles. Devil worshippers. Islamic radicals. French intellectuals.

I'm only half-joking here. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, such as the geeks behind Powerset, have attempted to compete with Google by building a better search engine. Or, more often, they haven't bothered, because they recognize that any challenger would have to be so much better, to kill Google's momentum, that the task is impossible.

But they're taking the wrong approach. At some point, the internet, like television before it, will be sufficiently mature as a medium that technological innovation can no longer upturn the established order. In that environment, competitors can only win market share by prising away a particular demographic, as cable networks such as MTV and ESPN ate into the audience share of network television, by addressing particular audiences and topics more obsessively.

Maybe one can't supplant Google as the default search engine; but a rival could provide a search engine that is tailored for women, or teenagers, or, as in the example above, for people who define themselves as conservatives. How would these vertical search engines been distinguished? Maybe they would assign authority to a defined list of approved sites. A patriotic search engine might index only the universe of highly interlinked sites around properties such as Fox News, Michele Malkin and Instapundit — and remove any foreign-language content. For instance.

Would a conservative search engine beat Google? No, but it might beat Google among hardline conservatives, who make up a good 10% of the population, even in during this liberal ascendancy. Which, given the stupendous profits from search marketing, is an audience worth having. If Google loses momentum, it won't be because the Mountain View giant faces a better search engine; but because it's contending with a thousand competitors, all counter-programming.