We are all ears on ideas on how to beat Google :-)
But on a serious note; i do not think that the aim is to beat Google because of Google but because on the monopoly they have on the access to the information. And that's why we are building a potential alternative there.
Attacking from a different domain, might beat Google on that area, or let's go wild here, perhaps even on revenue, but would not fix the problem we wanted to fix to the begin with.
"Replicating" 99% of the functionality with a quality to be good enough is a very valid option IMHO. Otherwise if one decides to leave Google, where do they go? If they do not want to advertise on Google, where do they go? There are too few alternatives, there are many names, but most of them are aggregators (full or partial). That said, if besides Bing, there would be 4 or 5 like them (or better), then yes, I concede that Cliqz as is, would make no sense.