I believe trying to create a general search that's better than google is pretty much a lost battle. I think the next big thing in search will start as a niche

I believe trying to create a general search that's better than google is pretty much a lost battle. I think the next big thing in search will start as a niche thing. If you reduce your user domain you can have a better shot at producing better results even without tracking. For example, you could develop a search engine for developers/IT people, make it's results better than google's and then expand to other domains.