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I think it's quixotic to compete with Google/Bing on the index size. A good bet would be to try to compete on search flexibility i.e. allowing for various ways of slicing/dicing results, recombinance etc. IMHO Search needs a paradigm shift from the 10 blue links to a knowledge engine (a la Wolfram alpha).

The vast majority of searches can be satisfied by some of the open source indexes. For the "long tail", there is always Google.

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I agree. I don't know anyone my age who notices an improvement in the ability to find online information since about 2005. Yet the quantity of pages on the internet has grown by an order or magnitude over that time. Good search is no longer a matter of indexing everything; it's a matter of indexing enough high quality information.

>Good search is no longer a matter of indexing everything; it's a matter of indexing enough high quality information.

and I would add ability to digest that information into something usable would be next.

Can you or someone else recommend any resources on the knowledge engine/"Wolfram alpha" architecture and how it differs from a traditional inverted index style search engine?

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