First, Matt Cutts said "Paul's #1 suggestion is reinventing search. I happily welcome competition in search because it keeps us on our toes, but his #2 suggestion resonated with me more: reinventing email."
They just today released (for the first time, and they even call it huge news) a video about what they do on a search, I'm sure watchers must have thought that search is so advanced and hard seeing that video that they might give up ;-)
I wonder what pushed them to post this video. It's not even very informative, it talks about searches of N-grams and spell corrections, it seems more like something to show how advanced the changes they make are. It must be so hard to catch up with them ;-)
Maybe GOOG is afraid of a plethora of startups reinventing search. One may succeed.