Timing and Infrastructure (Score 1)

When Google came into being in 1997, the web was a fraction of the size it is today, and search engines were still proliferating. Now, Google's massive storage centres subsume the web, and this is part of what gives its search engine its astonishing power.

It would be very difficult for another search engine company to follow suit (start up in a garage with a dozen networked computers) given the current state of the web - even if they did manage to find a better algorithm than the company which makes a habit of simply hiring the best PhDs and graduate students they can get their hands on.