[dragonwriter]

> Perhaps I am naive but monetizing searches, email and other things doesn't count as any of the world's hardest problems.

Working on monetization isn't, AFAIK, what Google engineers do, that's what Google business folks do.

Google engineers work on things like natural language processing for conversational search, or predictive algorithms for identifying information needs in advance and providing them at the right time without requiring an active search -- and that's just for Google's fairly prosaic mainstream products, not the GoogleX/Calico/etc. moonshot kind of work.