yes, but Oracle is /very/ sales and corporate support (sales) heavy. those people will not help you build a search engine, at least not a search engine with Google's target customers and business model.

Now, 'enterprise search' for internal stuff? Oracle could do that. Oracle might even be able to get corps to pay for a subscription-based 'search for corporations' that cleaned up most of the porn and more shady spam. but they couldn't do an ad-based search targeted at everyone, like google does.

If nothing else, most people are aware that google knows everything about you, and uses that knowledge to serve you ads. this only works because people, by and large, trust google to not go too far overboard.

>Considering that a single determined programmer can make a great search engine (duckduckgo.com), I find it hard to believe that among all of those 115000 employees, Oracle would not be able to find a few who could make a good search engine.

do you think duck duck go will last after it becomes worth spammer time to game them? I've said before that the search engine market has something of a negative barrier to entry; your job is /much/ easier while you are small enough that most spammers ignore you.

Another problem oracle would have is that Oracle isn't cheap. the are used to environments where you can shell out one or two orders of magnitude more than you would for commodity disk to get a really nice storage unit. Running a search engine is all about making the cheapest hardware that could possibly work run without going down when a bit of hardware crashes in a weird way.

Overcoming this cultural bias towards "buy good stuff" is pretty difficult. Then, they will have to face a set of technical challenges they are not used to facing. There are a whole lot of problems that go away when you decide to pay for a really high quality storage unit. I mean it's so bad that I pay 2x as much per gigabyte so I can have "enterprise' sata and not worry about most of those problems. Judging from, say, s3 prices (at scale, its $0.037 per gigabyte for four copies of the data, if my information is correct, which it might not be) it's quite possible that the big players use hard drives that are even more prone to failure than the consumer-grade drives that I have access to.