Today, everybody wants to be Googles good boy. We all hope for attention and money which is exlusively distributed by Google these days. Entrepreneurs even want to sell their business and their souls to godfather Google.

Is that real entrepreneurship - playing someone elses game as good as you can? Why not go after Google itself? Linus Torvalds didnt write cool applications. He rewrote the operating system.

I like the idea to rewrite the web. To reorder how the whole thing works and turn it from monopoly to ecosystem again. I feel fed up with the whole Googleweb.

Linus re-implemented an existing thing; Unix. He didn't go off and invent his own OS with its own concepts, e.g. Plan 9. I think he's a bad example for your point.

Alright. You are correct.

Lets do it all completely different. Lets get rid of search and advertising alltogether.

Any ideas?

Focusing your attention on beating Google is as bad as focusing on being on their good side. Instead, look for ideas that make people's lives better, but for some reason no one seems to have implemented them.

I for one dream about beating Google. My scheme would have been a p2p based search engine - by now there are projects trying to do that, but not with very good results, I think :-(

I might have overestimated the demand for privacy, too...

I also think the social bookmarking things would have a chance in improving on Google.

How does a p2p search engine improve the results upon a non-p2p search engine, e.g. Google?

We can imagine different search results for a same request depending on the peers you connect to (if you connect to people you know). You would share a dedicated subset of a search engine with your fellow Cthulhu programming language fans, one with your coworkers, another one with your family, with your bowling club, etc.

Google always searches the same, entire web whoever you are; maybe it is not the best solution?

Yes, whether it is P2P or not is not very relevant to this problem. On the other hand, P2P allows a not-for-profit, ad-free, "do no evil", privacy and freedom of speech friendly search engine (because the infrastructure costs would be shared between the users). I guess a big problem would be the latency.

Exactly, my thoughts would have been to avoid the costs of the data center, and to provide more privacy. Although it is not trivial to protect the privacy in a p2p scenario either.

Well, I for one am about to launch a startup that pretty much goes head to head with one of Google's properties. Maybe I'm nuts.

We're going more 'side-to-side' with our new product:

http://www.litepost.com

(We're hoping to introduce new ideas and more usable presentation methods, without necessarily duplicating sheer technical superiority..that can always come later.)

Anyhow, I'd say you're not nuts. Google's products all suffer from numerous defects, not the least of which is usability (in many cases).

If you're going to beat up Google on searching, you're just playing their game...