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IIRC this came up when Apple tried to buy Dropbox - it was a way to accelerate the building of iCloud Drive. The Files app is essentially Apple's version of Dropbox, they make money charging for storage.

From what I recall a MSFT executive made a similar comment to Google that search was not a product (which turned out to be true).

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How do we know for certain (certain) that Search is not a product? After all, hasn't Google made billions off of it? If it's not a product, then is it a feature? What is it a feature of? If neither product nor feature, what is it?

What Google has made money on are the ads that show up next to the search results. That's their way of "charging" for search if you like.

Similarly for iCloud Drive / Dropbox, what they charge you for is storage, not the ability to look things up.

Search is a feature of the index / overall data catalog.

Fair point. So in this conceptualization, Google's "product" is advertising, and search is a feature that supports advertising.

That's right. :)

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