YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition.

But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.

Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Someone, somewhere will eventually do it. And there's nothing that would keep users on Google search when they do.

It's not like Facebook where's there's a huge network effect. Once there's a notably better search option, it wins very very quickly.

This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale.

Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.

25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.

Broadly agree.

For what Google does in search, say, first-cut, keywords/phrases and results sorted by a measure of gross popularity, page rank, and date (but, for a second-cut, clearly now with a lot of refining tweaks), it seems to me that they are doing a terrific job.

But as far as I can tell, Bing is doing about the same.

So, if are looking for something, have a few keywords/phrases that fairly accurately characterize what want, then Google/Bing can work well. They can be just terrific. But that scenario does at best poorly on a significant fraction of ("safe for work") search.

For this fraction, there are a lot of approaches, Web sites, etc. but nothing very good.

For this fraction, I worked out some new techniques and wrote the corresponding software.

For where Google/Bing work well, and often they are just terrific, my work will usually not be as good and only occasionally better.

But for nearly all of the fraction of "at best poorly", my work should be quite good and much better than anything else. My work is different, very different, and I believe that being so different is necessary (clearly not sufficient) for success in the fraction I am attacking.

Currently I'm loading some initial data. Then ..., maybe people will like it.

Of course, with all the usual start-up advice, my work is doomed to fail because I'm a solo founder if don't count my kitty cats! And, I'm not a college dropout. I didn't even drop out of grad school and did get my Ph.D. And I'm past 30. So, right, doomed!

But being successful at what I'm attempting would be exceptional; so we have to expect that much of my project is not the usual. So be it. I have some fairly good reasons to believe that my work should be successful; no way am I doing this just "on a wing and a prayer".

What do you think? Announce a private beta test here on HN? Get feedback? Get it working well. Polish the UI/UX. Go live, get more publicity, run ads, grow?

To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc.

To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight.

The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.

Just because an idea is inspiring, amazing, even culturally transformative, that doesn't mean it can be a business. And generally speaking, investors are only interested in ideas that can be businesses. (That's what makes them investors instead of philanthropists...or politicians.)

Here's another reason--new technologies don't always win, because older technologies improve too. When I was editing a tech e-newsletter over a decade ago, a major hot new technology was called organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). This display technology had a huge viewing angle, did not need a backlight, and was super power efficient. It could be printed onto plastic substrates that were flexible and even translucent. It was going to kill the LCD.

Except, it didn't. LCDs improved fast enough to hold onto the market--they got LED backlights, power efficiency, higher and higher resolutions, better viewing angles, better colors, and (maybe most importantly) cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because the volumes were so huge. And it turned out that OLED's had some problems that were not so easily solved. So while OLED is used commercially today, the volumes are small. LCDs, so far, have kept on winning.

Thinking further into this question you've posed...there has been a lot of discussion here on HN about how hardware is harder to work with than software. Whether this is true in anything other than for psychological or cultural reasons, who knows. But certainly there is more 'entropy' with your invested failures along the road to success and it's not as simple as deleting or cutting and pasting LOC in a computer file. Hardware is material.

Because only ultra-large, incredibly-rich companies can afford to have seriously large investments fail quite this often. Which is not to say they're a bad idea! This is how blue-sky research works.