There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.
The reason I think this is that the hard part of coding has always been humans getting clear on how they want a thing to work and then presenting this to a machine for execution. This is why we write code in programming language rather than natural language; programming language is an extension of formal logic and lets humans express with exactitud... See more