[marginalia_nu]

Given the economics involved (likely a fixed cost per query), I think it makes business sense to try to get few customers to pay a lot to get a lot, much more so than having many customers that pay a little and get results on par Google's free offering.

High end "boutique" search offering a refined search experience (at high computational cost) is a niche Google search can't compete with, since they're offering their search for free, and they'd take massive losses if they drastically increased the amount of compute per query.