> The real mystery is why nobody has ever been able to do better search than Google, or at least just as good. Google's search is the way it is now because the

> The real mystery is why nobody has ever been able to do better search than Google, or at least just as good. Google's search is the way it is now because they've now had 20 years to work on it. To create search of similar quality you'll need to spend a comparable amount of time (during which Google will not rest on laurels, but will continue to evolve). It would've been great if someone took the pains to implement, maintain and evolve a search similar to Google's at the time when Google became available (or a few years after that). Then it's possible we would have two high quality search engines now. But even that is a simplistic view of things. Everything that Google ultimately has feeds into its search. Google Translate? Helps Google understand pages in multiple languages. Google Maps? Helps Google learn people behaviour, places of interest, businesses etc. Google Patents, Groups, Books? Provide vast amounts of natural text to train models on. And so on and so on. A "just as good" search needs all (or nearly all that) that to become just as good.