I'm not sure either matter, ultimately. It's the industrial structure, rather than the demands of the job (provide a good search engine) that matter here. In o

I'm not sure either matter, ultimately. It's the industrial structure, rather than the demands of the job (provide a good search engine) that matter here. In order to be a sustainable google competitor, you need to be a competing search business, not just a competing search engine. The business model is such that market share affects unit value. A search business with 1% of google's traffic (or 1% of fb's social traffic) does not make 1% os google's revenue. More scale, more unit value. Meanwhile, the way most/many small search engines monetize is via adwords. Adwords has already been found guilty (EU court) of abusing this nasty grip on their (minimal) competition's revenue avenue.