Being beholden to your main competitor is a losing strategy. It's made them a lot of money in the short term to lose it all in the longer term. It's easy to comment on this in retrospect, but I personally think they should have considered this more seriously before making a deal with the devil.
Maybe settling for less cash, and working with partners you don't directly compete with, like DuckDuckGo and the like, would be a better long-term strategy even if it means less cashflow and a smaller company in the short term.
