I don't see google as a 800lb gorilla, I see google as the new yahoo - desperately trying to diversify their technology and revenue before the inevitable hits. True, with the amount of cash they have they aren't desperate, but the last few quarters of revenue have been a wake up call, (check 1 year returns on stock price google vs. yahoo - no different, in fact google seems a little bit worse).
People think google's ranking algorithm is some secret magic, but it's not, it's page rank, it's well known and public. They have salt & spices, such as giving weight to shortor domains, keyword in the domain, etc., but even these are fairly well understood (see http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-fact...)
As costs come down in the infrastructure space, I expect to see more people take google head on in delivering relevant search results. Cuil is just the first high profile attempt.
The software is practically already written too, Yahoo! uses and contributed a lot to Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/).
And hey, the google guys started in a garage, you can beat the next big search will too.
A lot of good that does you: it's patented.
This is very misleading. Most of firefox's development happened when Internet Explorer wasn't undergoing active development at all. That's the real reason they were able to pass Internet Explorer so quickly.
