[belfalas]

What Google has made money on are the ads that show up next to the search results. That's their way of "charging" for search if you like.

Similarly for iCloud Drive / Dropbox, what they charge you for is storage, not the ability to look things up.

Search is a feature of the index / overall data catalog.

[profsummergig]

Fair point. So in this conceptualization, Google's "product" is advertising, and search is a feature that supports advertising.

[belfalas]

That's right. :)