As someone who remembers just how dreadful search results were before google, I concur wholeheartedly. All the brilliant execution in the universe won't do you any good at all if no one wants to visit your site because your search results suck. Google was able to dominate because their far superior search results gave them lots of users to sell to advertisers.

Right and Facebook prevailed through being a technology company and having amazing engineers to make the technology scale. They just turned on their first data center outside of the USA (in Sweden). That datacenter is comprised of technology developed 100% by Facebook and it's 100% open sourced (including hardware). That's the power and innovation of a true technology company.

Myspace was never ever a technology company and neither were many of the competing social networks like Friendster. Facebook just built a better product. Just like Google did.