You can't be just a bit better than Google and you certainly can't be worse. It's very difficult to be better than Google, that's an enormous challenge unto itself. That's greater than a billion dollar problem just to get warmed up if you're talking competing with them at large scale. If you listened to HN, Google sucks and it's easy to produce a superior search engine because of how bad they are now. That's false; even if Google's quality has eroded, they are not a mediocre search engine. That notion comes from the same place wherein people proclaim they can create a serious Uber competitor in a weekend (and mysteriously these people never do anything of the sort).

You're going to need a quantum leap improvement over Google to unseat their positioning. It has to be very substantial to overcome all the various moats they have, not least of which is consumers being used to using Google, the brand awareness.

The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and conquer one segment after another from there. It won't be a massive general search engine that shows up one day (which is what the Google watchers have been waiting for forever - that new behemoth comprehensive competitor is never going to arrive fully formed). There's a decent possibility consumer Web search will be a later stage addition to said new niche competitor, consumer Web won't be its primary or initial target. They'll add on general consumer Web search as a "we might as well" offering once they conquer enough niches.