- More local focus; naver.com is the king is S. Korea, Yandex is the leader in Russia, Baidu is the clear leader in China.
- Local language content: Google does appear to have comparable collections of sites not in the English language. This is one of the main reasons it can not compete with Yandex.
- Vertical search engines (or a domain specific search engine) devoted to a specific subject do better — they do not have as large of a collection of information to process, as a result, they are in the position to repurpose and mashup data to users’ needs. Zillow.com and Trullia.com are good examples.
- Google has an algorithm that places emphasis on particular aspects of a page markup, for instance title tag, domain, description. You could create a search engine that ignored SEO by only focussing on domain age, content (quality?) and links. At the moment the amount of value Google gives to content related links is minimal to overall weight of links from anywhere.
- Randomly display results. Rather than always showing the best ranking websites for a search, a search engine could randomly display the top 20 (top 100) and see what the bounce rates/engagement rates are for those sites. They could then be ranked accordingly
How would you beat Google at its own game?