my take is that the big bottleneck in search is not the index or the search but in understanding what it is the user is searching for in the first place. that

my take is that the big bottleneck in search is not the index or the search but in understanding what it is the user is searching for in the first place. that becomes a big can of worms very quickly, and starts to put into perspective some of googles other most successful verticals: NLP, Translation, Maps ("Near me"). Of course a lot of the verticals are also a generic means to get value out of all the server resources and experts required to operate the engine and then additional related branches to those verticals (email -> drive -> docs)