It's harder than ever to escape local optimums. Invent a better drug for high blood pressure? It needs to compete with several older, cheaper "OK" drugs for the same condition. Invent a better electricity source? It needs to compete with fully depreciated power plants that were built 25 years ago. Invent a better large scale search algorithm -- an innovation on the order of PageRank? Googlebot is welcome on billions of pages that will aggressively try to prevent you from crawling them. Google's "good enough" search plus stronger position in content acquisition will prevent people from escaping the local optimum.