Reminds me of this classic pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Specifically this quote: "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."

There has been a lot of grumblings about the state of search these days. Maybe the time is nigh for a new search engine?