Hi Richard! I think competition against Google is a good thing, so I will give you and whoever else is tackling this area the strategic advice I would give myself if I was in this problem space.
If you read the comments, including your own, you’ll come to the same conclusion people did 30 years ago, while witnessing Netscape accidentally hand Yahoo the keys to the kingdom: if you want to control the search engine, control the web browser. And if you want to control the web browser... Make a web browser.
That’s not a particularly profound thought, obviously. Having a great index only took Google so far — it was obvious to them that their fate was in the hands of the browsers, and that they’d have to either own the browsers or pay the people who owned them. They did both. They’re still doing both, and that very simple equation drives a very significant portion of their entire empire.
At this point, you’re (You is? Hmm...) doing neither of these things. You’ve got a browser extension and a website that is easy to visit and then forget about. But the world of 2021 requires you to solve that browser problem if you’re going to get anywhere.
Since you’ve got access to the largest pool of capital in the world, why don’t you do it? Go back to Benioff and your other investors and tell them they’ve under-funded the mission for what you’ve got to do to make a dent in this problem space: you need to create a really great search engine and a really great web browser, and have the two tightly integrated and coupled in a way that DoJ-wary Google could never do in 2021. Yes, it’s a mission that requires a zero added to that $20m war chest, but it’s also big and weird and exciting enough to get a lot of really smart people to come out of retirement and under-employment to see what’s possible.
There’s still a very high chance of failure with this strategy, but there’s also a very high chance of something interesting and weird and different coming out of it, such that those who are involved as both employees and users would say, “that didn’t work, and I would have been financially better off just parking my savings in GOOG, but the work we did was truly different and special.” The best people in Silicon Valley are always chasing this sort of romance. You know, like, “come make a ‘dent in the universe’ at my failing computer company that acquired my other failing computer company, even though you’ll be underpaid and get stock options that are likely to be worthless, because we could maybe possibly redefine the future of computing.” Benioff once knew a guy like that.