While search could be better, Google's results for text are good enough. How much better could text search get? Is it possible for someone to build a search experience so compelling that I would want to switch? And even if someone made a new, compelling search technology, could they get advertisers to switch over?
Actually, I don't think there's any upper limit to how much more relevent you can make text search. You could have an AI that directly answers your questions based on the knowledge it's gained from processing the entire net, with references supplied.
More easily implementable, you could have something that cross references a knowledge base such as Wikipedia (or just analyse the content of articles themselves) to split results into relevent categories, eg, Paris the city and Paris Hilton. Or, more tricky, one that I faced today - Flash Reflection, which could mean either a graphical effect or runtime type information.
What about reddit style voting? Google tried this, but I'm sure that ranking results by some measure of searcher satisfaction would be a great way to cut out duplicate/spammy content. Pagerank isn't.
I'm sorry, but calling it "good enough" is more of an indicator of lack of imagination than the merits of Google search.
Yeah - so far there are about 3 clear leaders (30-40% higher than the others). I probably need to run the ads for another two weeks before I know for sure, though.
This question has been asked plenty of times before. Look up variations of "business/idea guy needs hacker." But you should at least hack a bit with Ruby on Rails so at the least you won't piss off your technical co-founder. If you have deep domain knowledge, significant contacts, and a problem that is worth solving, then getting a hacker co-founder should be pretty straight forward.
It is my personal belief that the team composition depends on the type of opportunity and where the core competitive advantage will come from. If you are a lawyer, and you want to make a paperless solution for legal firms, you better believe you'll need a technology wiz. However, if the technology component is honestly only a small part of the overall problem, then you can perhaps look to getting an employee or contract out the tech work.
I disagree. Stick (and perfect) what you do best naturally. Yes, you don't need to have a CS degree to be good at programming, but you DO need to have a passion for it. Actually, having passion for what you do is what makes you an attractive partner to start a new business together. I personally could care less if it's a law or technology, as long as you're in love with what you're doing and it fits the objectives of the venture.
Learn some basic hacking in (insert functional language here). I'm not trying to start a programming language flame war.
The point of the statement is to do just enough so that you don't drive away potential technical cofounders. Basically make yourself more attractive as a cofounder by avoiding the traps that many other non-technical cofounders fall into.
