yes, in fact I think this is the perfect time for it. Google has hit a wall. It has not really gotten that much better in years.
Any new player cannot be just as good as google. It must be much better than google. If you manage to build something that is objectively better you can expect investors to shower you with money. Would not be surprised if google, facebook, MS would enter a bidding war to buy you. Don't know if Apple would be interested though.
The only way google can improve search is to drastically change their search algorithms. Perhaps throw away whatever they are doing right now and approach it from a new direction. This is the opening I believe new players have. A new approach to search, like contextual search will probably be enough to seriously threaten google.
I think human powered search could be achieved by Google. All they need to do is track our clicks on the serps and interpret which sites are good. Rotate all sorts of sites in the serps and gradually build a database. The whole thing would be like a wiki, with everyone contributing a little, and benefitting from the whole. The only way to accurately beat spam and low quality is to use human feedback. They probably do use human feedback already, just in a different way.
I'm wondering if reddit and Facebook could use this approach to build search engines. They do have large databases of human preferences.
The machine learning (AI) approach:
Another idea would be to distill information from the web Watson-style and try to answer many questions directly instead of redirecting to external pages. So far Siri, Watson, Wolfram Alpha are ahead in this field.
Any new player cannot be just as good as google. It must be much better than google. If you manage to build something that is objectively better you can expect investors to shower you with money. Would not be surprised if google, facebook, MS would enter a bidding war to buy you. Don't know if Apple would be interested though.
The only way google can improve search is to drastically change their search algorithms. Perhaps throw away whatever they are doing right now and approach it from a new direction. This is the opening I believe new players have. A new approach to search, like contextual search will probably be enough to seriously threaten google.