I've heard more or less the same thing said about IBM, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.

There is one way to compete with Google search. Google search is a general search engine. But what if you only wanted medical information? information about cars? information about physics? electronics? history? etc.

Specializing makes for a much smaller scope of the problem, and being specialized means it could deliver more useful results.

For example, imdb.com. I don't ask google about movie stuff, I go to imdb.com because it specializes in movie info.