[melted]

Insane web traffic doesn't actually cost you much. Au contraire, my friend, it brings in the dough. What costs you money is the long tail, those deep, obscure searches which you have to answer to be perceived a worthwhile competitor to e.g. Google. To answer the long tail yourself you must have it in the index, which makes for a _very_ big index. And then you also have to figure out how to get the relevant results out of there in a hundred milliseconds (or 50ms if you're Google, and you have instant search), and update all that goodness to keep it fresh, so that it doesn't take three months for new pages to appear. If you think this wouldn't cost much to a startup, you don't know much about search.

And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.