I agree. You can say a lot of bad things about Google, but they definitely have some of the smartest and highest paid engineers working on their search. Plus th

I agree. You can say a lot of bad things about Google, but they definitely have some of the smartest and highest paid engineers working on their search. Plus there are already a lot of people trying to compete with Google and so far, no one seems to provide consistently better results. The only advantage a startup might have is that they could do completely new concepts, such as specifying what area you search in, allow you to modify their classification of your query and/or moderating sites you include - which is probably necessary anyway, since you'll hardly have the budget to fully index the web. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not going to be easy at all. And after all of that, you still need a way to make some money.