>I welcome any competition at this point. Microsoft tried and failed to build a competitor and it's not like they have shallow pockets. They grossly underesti

>I welcome any competition at this point. Microsoft tried and failed to build a competitor and it's not like they have shallow pockets. They grossly underestimated a number of aspects: - The huge number of man-years invested in Google's search quality stack hand-tuning and what it would take to replicate it. - The fact that the machine learning field was simply not ready to tackle the search quality problem. - The infrastructure required to build a crawler / indexer stack as good as Google's I think in 2020, the second problem is within reach of many companies technically. It's mostly a matter of throwing enough money at optimized infrastructure. However, replicating the search quality stack is going to be very hard, unless someone makes a huge breakthrough in machine learning / language modeling / language understanding at a thousandth of the cost it currently takes to run something like GPT-3. The most likely candidate to execute properly on that last bit is - unfortunately - Google.