I don't know if I believe that. It sounds too similar to: "Building a decent search engine requires index data. Altavista has a bigger index, so Altavista is better. Simple."

Well that was true once. But people have higher standards for search engines now that they don't want to go through every result by hand, and therefore the main thing they're after is the ranking algorithm not the search algorithm.

Right, and maybe for the next generation of search engines it'll be something else again. Having the most query/clickstream data is what counts now, but there's no guarantee it will always count the most.