Beat me to it. This is now an old entrenched industry overripe for a little...disruption (what a nauseating term, I just don't know what else to call it).

This is my focus next year.

Placing many small bets that niche/vertical search will make this space much more interesting.

I just hope one vertical is web forums. AFAICT, most useful knowledge that I search for is in the collective archives of reddit, stack overflow, comments here, and the endless sprawl of vbulletin.

My thought exactly. But Google has built such a big moat that it'd be hard for any new player to take out any considerable market share from them.

The only way to beat Google is to come up with a whole new paradigm for information access. Perhaps something like Wolfram alpha for the web.

Can't we beat Google by being better than them at solving the search problem?

Google launches approximately one new and helpful search feature per year. What if you launched a company or conjured up a community that could give birth to two helpful features per year, wouldn't that company or community catch up and eventually surpass them in functionality?

This company wouldn't have to come up with a new paradigm for information access. Instead, they would have to come up with a way to launch helpful search features that wasn't dependent on PII. To me that doesn't sound as scary as having to come up with a new paradigm for information retrieval. To me it sounds fully doable.