Apart from PageRank not being based on ML, there's also the fact that Google did better search than those other services which also had the data, and it does better search than Bing now though Microsoft has no shortage of data, processing power, or money to acquire more of both.

Generally how much data you need for ML varies with the problem and to say that it's all in the data and large server farms is perhaps a nice talking point for VCs but can be completely true, completely false, or anywhere in-between depending on the problem.