<i>Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google.</i><p>And there will not be any time soon. Writing an <i>efficient</i> crawler for what we call the &quot;modern&quot; web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technologies Google had years to perfect (in addition to solving problems like storage, search logic and bandwidth management).