[cturner]

    > There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter
    > the search space.

But there were before Google started as well. Google entered the search engine party after it seemed to be over. I remember reading about them first on slashdot and thinking - wow - someone still thinks there's room to break into this? Surely portals are the proving ground. (Who knows? Maybe they are.)

Something particularly interesting about Google is that they just took the industry head-on. I'd guess that there'd be areas where you could build a kind of search engine that was better than the market leader, and focus on carving out a niche. Yandex have done just this with the Russian market. (and there's an example of a commercially-viable post-google search engine business).

But Google just went after being the leading power.

History in general, but in our space in particular, is written by small, well-coordinated teams who can repeatedly execute. If you can get that team together, you can do almost anything.