True. In this case, I forgot to mention that not having a world-facing UI deprived us of vital signals that Google used to improved their experience. We had query logs, but we had no idea of what our customers' users were doing within a session, no user history, etc.
We had a world facing UI, and all the insight that produced, and we still weren't able to sway management that there might possibly be a profitable search business.
In the age of napster people were using our service-- and falling in love with it-- finding music on the internet.
Nope, no money there. Better to sell to ISPs in canada and hope they integrate our results with Inktomis.