Earlier quoted context omitted.
>you cannot acquire a corpus of decades of historical searches and click data nor can you employ the thousands of human raters No, but as soon as Google starts abusing their monopoly status by turning into something reminiscent of Alta Vista, a new search engine will sprout up. Google itself grew like wildfire in the late 90s not only because it offered superior search results, but because of the massive global reach…
How will this new search engine 'spring up' if nobody can build a better search engine because the resources are not available? You are right that net neutrality enabled Google's growth, but the barriers to a Google competitor are different now, and far more difficult to overcome than what Google faced. Google is not trusted, but people use it because there is no alternative and the barriers to an alternative being b…
The biggest challenge in replacing google would be getting the advertisers. Especially because at the start, your low userbase makes targeted adds much harder to pull off.