Comment by nopinsight

Point taken.

However, the situation today is quite unlike the day when Google was born. Back then, most search results were almost a collection of random links with keywords on them. Then Google found a fairly simple new approach, Web-link analysis (PageRank), that totally outperforms the keyword-based approach. And Google was the first to exploit this approach on a large scale. (Yes, there were other researchers who discovered a similar approach based on Web links and also outperformed all those other large search engines at the time. But they didn't commercialize the work well enough.)

Now, there is little chance that such a low-hanging fruit is still left undiscovered. To improve search further, it's likely that you need to either or both of the followings:

1) bring in additional information, like user personal preferences. (Google is doing this with their personalized search.)

2) deal with very complex issues like natural language processing (e.g. reading the Web like humans do), semantic Web, inference with ambiguous chain of evidence, other advanced AI issues. (Google probably bought the whole of Powerset just to help make this problem a little more tractable.) (Chacha.com sidesteps the issue by using real humans to do the work.)

I'd say unless you're a real genius and has been studying NLP & AI for a long time, it's extremely unlikely you'd beat all the AI experts at Google. Since AI & NLP are inherently complex stuff, no single paper or invention is likely to break a total new ground as in Physics (think Einstein's Special Relativity).

Sorry to disappoint, but there are certain product areas where likely improvements will be just incremental. We'd better choose our terrain well. Justin.TV didn't compete directly with Youtube for this reason.

That's why, as a startup, you don't really want to compete with Gillette in shavers or Intel in PC microprocessors (or Hacker News in news for hackers, for that matter) by out-inventing them. We'd have a much better chance by finding a whole new ball game to play.