[izendejas]

On the first statement, I think it's mostly right and he's merely just re-stating what Peter Norvig has stated all along albeit not as precisely.

On the second statement, I believe you both missed the point. Google was able to acquire click-through data which helped train it's rankin algorithms better by establishing the partnerships with Yahoo and AOL. It was the implicit feedback, not the crawled data that helped. But that obviously wasn't the only factor--having very smart engineers/scientists matters. But I think now that a lot more is open sourced, computing power is cheaper, etc the OPs thesis is that data is now the hardest thing to come by, and on this I fully agree.