Great write up and break down of why search is hard and how unique a position Google is in. That said searching the entire web as a business isn't very feasible

Great write up and break down of why search is hard and how unique a position Google is in. That said searching the entire web as a business isn't very feasible for many companies now and hence most of the other giants competing with Google instead use the asymmetric approach of bringing content into their own garden and building a specialized search engine around it. Since the data in their own garden is structured the amount of work to build an acceptable quality search engine is relatively less. See apple's app store, facebook search, twitter's search, amazon's a9 etc.