What strategy would you take to build a search engine today?
Perceval: I would rethink things fundamentally.  That requires a lot of abstract thinking about ontology, but that's how the past revolutions in search began.Yahoo treated the web like a phone book or directory.  Altavista relied on self-categorization efforts in meta tags.  Google treated links as votes.You need to come up with a new (and hopefully better) way of thinking about what the web is.  Come up with an inventive way of thinking about what linking means, what DOM structure means, how to think about non-standard types of content, and so on.If you start with the same premises about the web that Google started with in 1997, you'll never surpass them much less carve about anything more than a toy niche.