Google's secret sauce are its users. They get many billions queries a day and feedback on what urls all those users click - simply throw all that into modern M

Google's secret sauce are its users. They get many billions queries a day and feedback on what urls all those users click - simply throw all that into modern ML and you'll end up with pretty decent ranking already. A small startup, especially a paywalled one, will just starve for data and has little hope to compete here - that's why they'll be buying results from bing for the foreseeable future.