I just hope one vertical is web forums. AFAICT, most useful knowledge that I search for is in the collective archives of reddit, stack overflow, comments here, and the endless sprawl of vbulletin.

Can't we beat Google by being better than them at solving the search problem?

Google launches approximately one new and helpful search feature per year. What if you launched a company or conjured up a community that could give birth to two helpful features per year, wouldn't that company or community catch up and eventually surpass them in functionality?

This company wouldn't have to come up with a new paradigm for information access. Instead, they would have to come up with a way to launch helpful search features that wasn't dependent on PII. To me that doesn't sound as scary as having to come up with a new paradigm for information retrieval. To me it sounds fully doable.