If you're in the mood for a glimpse into the mind of Microsoft's CEO, the company this morning posted the full transcript of Steve Ballmer's on-stage Q&A with Danny Sullivan yesterday morning at the Search Marketing Expo West. The event generated lots of headlines, but the transcript makes for an interesting read.

One funny result from the appearance is that lots more people are suddenly tracking Lakeside School's varsity basketball team. At one point during the speech, Ballmer acknowledged that he has used an anonymous Twitter account to tweet the scores of his son's games. Gizmodo did some digging and found this LakesideBball account. Whether or not that's the one, it suddenly has many more followers.

Back on topic, Ballmer had a wide-ranging discussion with Sullivan, on topics including the touchy subject of Microsoft's involvement in recent antitrust complaints against Google, which was the subject of a well-reported Wall Street Journal article this week. Here's what the Microsoft CEO said.

Legal is determined by regulators, not by Microsoft. We can comment as to things that are making it harder for us to provide effective competition. And certainly we comment when we have publishers and advertisers who are sharing some of their issues with us and there are certainly things that people do share with us. What can a marketer do. How much data does a marketer get back about the outcome of their campaigns, how much of that can they share.

How much of that can they transfer and use algorithmically and other campaigns they’re going to run. I mean, there’s a whole set of things which I think if you take a little bit of a vote of the audience you’ll find that there’s a lot of frustration, but what’s lawful and not lawful ultimately will be a judgment that gets made by, as I said, by the regulators.

At that point, Sullivan took Ballmer up on his offer, asking for a show of hands to see how many people in the audience were frustrated with Google. Sullivan noted that only person raised a hand.

Asked whether Bing can ever knock Google out as the top search engine, measured by market share, Ballmer responded, "There’s no good answer to this question ... If you say yes, you sound arrogant. If you say no, you sound like you have no faith. So the answer is, yes, someday. You don’t do things, I don’t think most people do things with the goal of being second. And yet, I think, a fair degree of realism is required about where the current state of affairs is; even when you pool the volumes from us and from Yahoo!, we’ve got a lot of work to do, and it’s a really competitive market."

Here again is the full transcript.