I'm not disputing that you can sink inordinate amounts of money into a search engine, but on the flip side, I am running a search engine.

It indexes not tens of thousands of pages, but has a peak capacity of about 100 million documents. I can crawl over a billion documents per month.

I don't really see anyone suggesting competing with Google or Bing off a PC in your garage, but it is absolutely and demonstrably feasible to build complementary services without any budget at all.

It doesn't require huge numbers of developers, it doesn't require a small country's allotment of bandwidth, and it doesn't require data-centers full of prohibitively expensive hardware.