Well, it's true that Google has a lab-like structure. Computing the index is a massive continuous "training" job that takes multiple entire clusters (when I worked there at least), and a Google cluster could easily consume an entire rented colo facility. And you need to have crawled large chunks of the web, then done a lot of expensive calculations, before you can serve a single query. Scaling down the crawl/index pipeline is possible to some extent but not much - no different to LLM training.

So I think the reason for the value gap is purely in the proprietary IP. The recipe for making a good LLM is more or less public, unless you buy into the "everyone just distils claude/gpt" angle. The recipe for making a good search engine is private.