It occurs to me that competing with Google on their home turf and at their scale might be impossible. But doing what Google was good at, when they just a search engine, might not be all that much harder today than it was back then. And it may fly "under the radar" of Google's current business priorities.
I'm thinking about how Etsy took "the good bit" of Ebay and ran with it. Or how tyre-and-exhaust shops take "the profitable bit" of being a mechanic and run with it. I know there's a name for this, but it eludes me.
It could be they also took the bit that eBay abandoned. There was a point when eBay announced to the business press that they were going to de-emphasize the "America's yard sale" aspect, and shift towards being a regular e-commerce site like Amazon.
