I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques. To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.