hah. I actually think Google is in a similar place. they aren't the first search engine, and I think their strongest claim on being the last isn't so much that they have some kind of moat, it's just that they've hired four out of five people who might compete with them.

I actually think the search engine market has the opposite of a network effect barrier to entry. If you made a search engine that was half of google's 'native effectiveness' (by which I mean googles effectiveness before the spammers start mucking it up) assuming your search algorithm is different enough that it's not gamed in the same way as google's, you will have a search engine that is more effective than google until it becomes worth the spammer's time to mess you up.

I think google's talent pool is interesting, though. they have a whole lot of really good people, and they are probably exploiting that talent better than any other company of similar size. It really seems like they should own more markets than they do.

I think Google's biggest weakness on that front is that they have nearly all their employees thinking that google is both competent and altruistic. I don't see the same internal dissent with my friends who work at google as I saw when I worked at Yahoo. At Yahoo, we'd point out what the company was doing wrong. At google, the employees seem to think their masters know best.

(this aside, the essential problem with search engines is that the advertising business model creates a conflict of interest; if the search results are that much better than the search ads, nobody will click on the ads. On the other hand, nobody has come up with another business model for 'generalized search')