I think we're getting closer to a time where smaller players can start competing in the search engine space. Recently here on HN someone launched a search edit

I think we're getting closer to a time where smaller players can start competing in the search engine space. Recently here on HN someone launched a search editor for small, niche, seo-free, old, content/text-heavy websites. It's useful because it serves a specific purpose, and can give you very different but useful results due to how it presents its results. Storage is getting cheap, scaling is a solved-ish problem, ML and AI make simple to empjoy intelligent search easier than ever. Of course, the solution is not to come up with a slightly tweaked google clone (like bing, duckduckgo, ...) but something that's more in the realm of reimagining what search means and does. I don't think it's wise to fight Google at its own game.