We started the company when we recognized that search had changed. In the beginning from something fully created at Yahoo! to something that was purely algorithmic at Google. The problem was that Google also created a problem by making it so easy to get money for Internet Ads, everyone could do it. And everyone has. This destroyed the utility of looking at the entire web and moved a lot of poor content to the top of Google's results. We built a search engine that was partially created (slashtags) and then machine learned based on previously curated known good content. It was such a great idea that Microsoft copied the strategy in 2012 and Google has admitted that even they are having to hand curate things.
But more importantly people's relationship with Search has changed, people rarely search for something like lawn furniture to find every page in every country of the world about Lawn Furniture, they use it like a giant catalog to find furniture they can buy to put on their lawn. Serving search as a service refines the notion of being a search company from searching everything on the web, to finding useful things for the query at hand and surfacing them quickly.