I don't thin it was a lack of focus that caused problems for us. The main problem for us was that building a search results that is--sometimes--20% better than Google's does not incentivize people to switch.
This is a problem Wikia Search, Blekko, Bing, DuckDuckGo and countless others have faced or are facing.
Although it's easy to change your search engine technically, it's not necessary unless your search engine is failing. The problem is that innovators look at the times when Google fails (i.e. when you see 2-3 horrible results in a SERP), but not when it succeeds (the other 7-8 search results).
We took a really hard run at making better results and we proved we could make something incrementally better. In our business making something slightly better is, essentially, failure because it will not cause folks to switch.
Now, in terms of educating folks, that's a wide open space. Right now there is no wikipedia, google or facebook of learning. There's Lynda for software, Rossetta Stone for language, Khan Academy for math and bunch of individuals teaching one-off things on YouTube.
We are making a brand that runs from how to do your hair, to how to solve angry bird, to how to make a movie poster in photoshop to how to make a vegan shake.... and on and on and on.
We have 40k+ videos now and make over 1k a week (with 90 people). We'll get to 3k a week in the next year (with 150-200 people). Then 5-6k videos (with 300-500 people).
We're already, we think, the largest providers of orignal (non-UGC) content to YouTube. And we only pivoted a year ago to do learning videos.
our ipad apps/courses should really drive traffic too... and forget about it when every TV is internet connected (which really starts this christmas and goes forward for the next 7 years).
best j