How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted ?

Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index ?

A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average ?

The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100k sites, thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites take 500k each and the remaining 99k split the rest ?

Given the stakes, why stop at $ 1 Billion Dollars ?

Cuban is a financial backer of Mahalo, the search engine honchoed by Jason Calcanis.

A commenter on Cuban's blog throws in one suggestion: "How many times have you typed a search into Google only to see Wikipedia as one of the first few results. Wikipedia would be a huge win for a company going after Google's core sites in this type of scenario."

The idea is that much chaos could be made by viewing web sites as potential "wins" for one search engine or another. That gives new perspective to that $40-billion-plus that Microsoft now has sitting in the vault after its inability to buy Yahoo.

Maybe it's time to start brushing up on those Search Engine Optimization skills, after all.