Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this is just asking for negative karma, but I too thought that the conventional wisdom was that the barrier to entry for search engines was relatively high. No, not telecom high, but it does take a pretty significant amount of hardware to index and deliver that much data. No?
Duck Duck Go has been doing a pretty good job of it, and from what I can tell, it's just one guy, self-financed.
He primarily relies on Y!BOSS, which uses a $300M infrastructure.