You've said it and it is rude, what's the point of that first sentence except to spite him? I'm sure he's well aware of the price per capability trend since 2005, you don't code a search engine without knowing that. Could be the costs of servicing his free users and/or maintaining an ever-growing database/index that is costly - in spite of cheaper hardware on a relative basis.

the complexity of the search algorithm has also increased substantially since 2005 And, in 2005, a billion page index was pretty big. Now it's closer to 100 billion.