When companies start to flail they nearly always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then they talk about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one. Altavista did a lot of that in the late nineties. Right before a competitor came in and fixed the AltaVista problem permanently. Yes, search is very hard. But Silicon Valley is really good at doing hard things. The real problem right now is that there’s a perception that Google is untouchable in search.
