In an engineering centric product. Why would a mom and pop email / news / casual gaming portal succeed directly because of good engineering? Time and time again we massively over-play our role in many business stories.
This is so true. For a website so heavily focussed on content, tech is only a small part of the game. Case point is youtube, though the tech challange with youtube is more complex. Nevertheless, youtube now has to survive on business deals and cannot depend on tech alone, unlike google search.