I didn't say anything about Google's value prop. My point is, whatever their value prop is, it's built on top of their ability to crawl the web at mass scale, and very quickly. So anybody who wants to compete with Google, by being better at "ranking pages, removing spam, personalizing it to the viewer," or whatever, will need to be able to do crawl in a similar manner. IOW, crawling is part of the "price of admission".
Yes, but I think the comment you responded to were saying that it is an insignificant part these days.
Maybe so. In which case, I'd say I disagree. Great crawling ability is definitely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for building a competitive search engine. And while the technical aspects of building a large scale search engine have been at least partly trivialized by OSS crawling software, elastic computing resources in the cloud, etc., what is at issue is the possibility of site owners blocking anybody who isn't (Google|Bing|Baidu|etc).
In this context, that's my concern: being blocked from crawling, if you're not already on the "allowed" list. Hence my reference to the question quoted above, from TFA.
In one aspect, it was literally their beginning, from which they were able to build a business and expand.
In another, much more on point aspect, it underlies the majority of their services, either directly of a few steps removed.
Like the foundation of a house, it may not always be the most visible aspect, and it may be taken for granted, but its contribution to the integrity of the whole can't be underestimated.
No, I don't. I didn't say anything even remotely like that. What I'm saying is that crawling is a prerequisite for all of the "... best treatment of that data to serve ads, personalise experience ..." stuff. That's why this topic matters: because if people aren't allowed to crawl (or can't do it effectively for technical reasons, but that's a subtly different issue), then they can't do anything else.
Just to be clear, I am most emphatically not saying that just building a crawler is enough to compete with Google. What I'm saying is that you can't build a competitive search engine without that "0.05%" bit because it's required to enable the other 99.95%.