Articles like these remind me of the Feynman algorithm: write down the problem, think really hard, write down the solution. There is nothing to see here. There will never be another google. It will be another company and it will succeed for a different set of random reasons than google did. You can't recreate the process just like you can't recreate Feynman and his algorithm for solving problems.
You're being overly pessimistic. Feynman's 'algorithm' isn't nothing, it's actually very rudimentary and important.
The act of writing the problem down requires you to have a language for discussing it. You also have to be able to specify what you are looking for in a solution. (That is, how do you know if you've solved the problem?) Then you work to produce a set of transformations from one to the other. That is the best way to purposefully solve any problem.
You can hire the people who think in this way though - they tend to populate graduate school (math, physics, etc.). That is one of the places Google hit hard when it came to hiring, which is partly what generated blockbuster success after cementing search - Google got to cherry pick some of the best of the best from graduate programs, and Google benefitted immensely from their minds.
