[boblebricoleur]

> Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man hours that have gone into making the current and previous implementations of Google's search engine

I don't think this question belittles Google's work.

I feel saying that would be like saying that animals that chose to live on the land were belittling millions of years of evolution in the water.

People working at Google chose to spends their time building a search engine for the world wide web, fine. That does not mean that sharing information accross a network has to be done via { world wide web, google }.

All of this is purely theroical of course, but I'm sure someone more creative than me would find another solution. Maybe not a solution that would exactly fit OP's description, maybe not a solution that would be practical with the current infrastructure.

But a solution that would render Google as-is obsolete ? Yes, I think that would be possible.