YC is not really for technical innovation, it's for product development: it's for taking X and doing something new with it, not for creating a revolutionary new X. For example, you certainly might have funded Facebook but I don't think you would have funded Google with Page Rank. There were a lot of search engines at the time and there was no clear market for it.
And that's not pejorative -- there's nothing wrong with that; you're not crying yourself to sleep at night.
Your whole application process reflects it: with tiny textboxes and the 10-minute interview time frame. It's perfect for saying "We're like MySpace for college students," but not at all appropriate for saying, "We use a new form of compiling search results that place ranking based on complex algorithm of reputation-based weighting."
A funny example was given by Noam Chomsky. A producer at CNN (IIRC) once told him they wouldn't feature him because "he is from Neptune and lacks concision." To which he replied something like that it was fair, because if you're saying something strikingly different, you look like you're from a different planet, and then you need to justify how you got there, and that means you have to talk a lot, so by definition you lack concision.
If these guys have spent years writing their own VM, they need a lot of time to talk about why they did that, the corner they turned and all of the complex differences their VM exhibits. A one-page application is fine if you're building Facebook for Cats but if you're doing something 'from Neptune', you can't have concision. They simply don't go together.