This blind spot in people's understanding of how the internet worked, works, and should work is why we got stuck accepting centralized services as normal. They are not sustainable though and will be superceded.
I wonder if Bitcoin2.0 projects like StorJ, Bitcloud, Filecoin will be instrumental in the creation of such a product.
The cost of providing Google's organic search service is dropping as compute hardware gets cheaper. But the ad volume isn't dropping along with it. That creates a vulnerability for Google - their "free" can be undercut on price. The problem with having high profit margins is that, to a lower-cost provider, you're lunch.
"Ello" is trying to do that to Facebook. "Ello" is probably much smaller than they claim to be; almost all their Google hits were in the first week of operation. But someone else may be able to bring that off.
And Mozilla has always been happy to ride the coat tails of Google Search. Declining AdWords revenue just means declining Mozilla revenue. Even if the two aren't partnering together going forward, Google helped Mozilla negotiate a high bid with Yahoo.
Long term, I think Mozilla wants to see Firefox OS compete with Android. There's a lot more revenue potential there and the best chance to rapidly grow their user base.
This is a huge liability for google. Any company with 98% of its revenues tied to one product necessarily creates a fundamental liability for itself. I'm sure google execs realize this, and that's why they are pouring so much revenue into "moonshots" and subscription services (not to mention government contracts). They are actively diversifying google's revenue because they realize it comes from a near single source, search, which may represent a fundamentally unsustainable product.
Can Google control the search market forever? Are people (specifically technophiles and "early adopters") not growing increasingly frustrated with them? The same groups of users that Google once relied upon as an initial source of traction are now abandoning the company's products in search of more open pastures.
Decentralization is an unstoppable trend with momentum across product verticals. File sharing was the first "mainstream" invocation of decentralization technology, and blockchain/Bitcoin is the most recent. (Interestingly, Bitcoin itself is a meta-enabler of decentralization as it introduces the possibility of an automated payment layer.)
Is it inevitable that that a decentralized search engine will replace the current centralized model that Google requires for its sustained business? When will it happen? How can such a movement gain momentum?
If I were an executive at a google competitor, I would be actively exploring these questions, and finding ways to push decentralized search products into the mainstream. Mozilla, Yahoo, are you listening?