Why trying to Out-Google Google is a search for FAIL (and how to actually do it)

When there’s an 800 pound gorilla in your space, trying to steal bananas isn’t exactly the smartest approach. You figure out what he’s not eating, and you start nibbling. Before you know it, you’re eating just as much as he is and wouldn’t you know it, one bad banana crop and he’s toast. So when I hear that someone wants to build a better search engine than Google, while I don’t think it’s impossible, I question along what lines they’re trying to do it. Can you really do it by indexing more pages than Google? I find that hard to believe, because an infrastructure arms race with Google seems like a bad idea—no matter how efficiently you think you can manage your crawling costs.