A user-supported search engine has promise. A telco, a handset maker, or a country could do an ad-free search engine. Cuil had about 30 people, and eventually got a half-decent search engine. It's surprising that Apple doesn't have their own search engine. Their negative experience with the map business may have scared them.

The economics of search are strange. Search has negative market value - Google paid about $100M/year to be the default on Firefox, and Google still pays to be on iPhones. It's like the ad channels on cable. The Jewelry Channel pays to be carried; the NFL gets paid to be carried. Google is in the Jewelry Channel position.

As compute power increases, the cost of doing search goes down. But that hasn't been reflected in the "selling price" of search, which is expressed as ad density. Google is a high-margin business because of that. That makes them vulnerable.

DuckDuckGo and Blekko, although tiny, are quite profitable. Even InfoSeek and Ask apparently still make money. There's room at the bottom.