The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good.

That suddenly got a lot easier, when excessively hackerish just means "it's not Google and doesn't give a flying fuck about visitor stats". Imagine an artist writing their song without thinking about their audience - those are the best songs. Likewise, maybe surveying the market and doing what people want, instead of what you think they need, is a bit overrated, the road to mediocrity and ultimately failure. Well, I can hope ^^