The barriers are not search algorithms. That’s easy. The first barrier is overcoming habit. I think that a genuinely better alternative will change habits. That worked for Google and with search boxes having multiple alternatives it really is simple to switch.

The second barrier is that success requires investing $$$ billions in server farms. Now that VCs have pumped money into lots of attempts and they are not seeming to get much traction we are entering a phase where nobody will put significant new money behind a search venture. This is like the decade or so when nobody would invest to challenge Microsoft.

That is bad news for everybody. It creates a monoculture and that’s always bad.

P2P networks are the only way to overcome that second barrier, avoiding the need for $$$ billions in server farms. P2P uses the infrastructure of the users.

I like the look of Faroo, the Peer to Peer Web Search company. There are some side benefits related to privacy and SEO spam control, but the core advantage of P2P for search is a very simple economic proposition. Because Faroo don’t need to invest in server farms they can return 50% of the search revenue to users. My guess is that models will evolve that give way more than 50% back to users. The payoff from scale without need to invest in scale is so enormous that ventures would be wise to give back whatever it takes to get scale. That is simple “show me the money”.