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There's an implicit assumption in most of these discussions that beating Google Search is a matter of money and scale, and while there are some evidence for that (e.g. unreasonable effectiveness of having lots of data), it is not a certain conclusion, it is only a conclusion if your goal is to beat Google by making an incrementally better classical search engine. It is indeed hard to beat something by offering something "about the same", when the cost for the consumer is already effectively zero from a monetary perspective. But this doesn't rule out someone coming up with a disruptive, radically better search. Take this as a thought experiment, somewhere out there, is another Albert Einstein, working on his magnum opus, an AGI based search engine. He has a mind blowing advancement in AGI, like GR was in Physics, that will completely eclipse classical search AND deep learning approaches AND he knows it. Demos shown to investors are mind blowing, and he quickly raises enough funds to launch a competitor. There is whisper and talk all around the valley. Google tries to make an acquisition, but he and his investors turn it down, because they can see how valuable the tech is. By the time Google realizes their offer should have been much bigger, it's getting traction and taking off like a rocket ship. Now Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, are all looking to acquire it. Yes, there are arguments that being the "default" is hard to dislodge. But Chrome dislodged IE. Google S