* I was also not exactly sober at the time, so these numbers may be a bit off. The number of wafers per chip being greater than 1, though, I am absolutely certain about.
With cheaper techniques, the idea is that the "more capital efficient" way of indexing the ever-expanding web would in turn provide better results for an improved consumer experience. It's the old adage of "do more with less".
For example, see the old Danny Sullivan graphs[0] showing how Google's index was growing faster than AltaVista. Having a bigger index lets one return more relevant search hits.
AltaVista wasn't just falling behind in "staleness" of old indexes; the aggregate size of the index was smaller than Google as well.
[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engin...
It did apply, to a point. Before Google, I had switched to AllTheWeb as my search engine of choice since a lot of sites just wouldn't show up in AltaVista no matter what you searched for, and ATW had a bigger index (I guess staleness could have had the same result).
But of course eventually I switched to Google for the better search results.
Do you believe Google's strategic decision to use commodity computers and hard drives gave them any competitive advantage (cheaper cost, scaling, etc) compared to DEC Alpha servers?
As an outsider, it seems like Google could iterate its data centers faster and cheaper and therefore, their web crawlers were cheaper to run (also run more frequently), also cheaper to store terabytes of data, and also cheaper to service search queries.