> But to claim Inktomi and AltaVista matched Google Search results I think is rewriting history, when Google launched, the difference in quality was quite obvious and striking.
Yes, that would be a foolish claim. Fortunately I made no such claim.
The differences at launch were indeed striking, much as they had been with HITS. That was in 1998. Four years later, at the time the article you linked to was posted, Google's market share was... 16%. While at that point they may have dominated mind share and brand value, they didn't dominate the market. That would come later.
Google's situation in 2002 was that they were no longer such a clear cut winner. Per the article: "Google much like Inktomi, must re-evalutate what it’s currently doing... ...search is going strong but the Penguin update has raised a lot of questionable results to the surface". Their search quality was already faltering. Of course, in the next twelve months, they'd literally gain as much market share as they'd garnered in the entire history of the company (and yes, that was a one time leap in market share).
I'll say it again: most of the market share gains came from the distribution channels. The cost of getting customers to switch was gigantic compared to the cost of just presenting them with your search engine first. The number of people using the Internet was growing by leaps and bounds then.
> There's still the possibility of someone upstaging Google, by building a search engine that not only indexes the Web, but has the reading comprehension to understand it, and understand queries from the context of gained knowledge.
That's been tried and failed. The technical difference didn't garner the market share needed to support it. I wouldn't say it is impossible for it to happen, but the odds are long, and ultimately the market largely does not appear to care.
> But you can't displace Google with a 2% improvement in results.
I guess it depends on how you are measuring 2% improvement, but by conventional metrics of the time, a 2% improvement now would be well neigh impossible to achieve. Again, that's part of the problem: the head of search engine queries have effectively been optimized to the point where there is little room for improvement beyond tiny fragments of the tail that amount to a percent or two of the average person's search history.