Comment by globuous

Sure, but 90% of the time, I and most people I know don't do very sophisticated searches. I'm actually mostly using google as a billion dollar search engine for wikipedia / stackoverflow / arch wiki / bbc / nyt / ft / whatever big site there is in a given domain. Because these sites happen to have 90% of what i'm looking for. For the rest, we all have our own little forums we follow: fb, hn, email etc.

So instead of trying to beat google on full web searches, the trick might actually be to index all 100 best ranking websites according to some metric (alexa rank for instance) and do it better than google. Then, maybe you can grab over 50% of the search traffic. For broader queries (in the search knowledge graph sense), in this scenario, people would fallback to google.