I assume he realizes that anything of the form "poor man's x" is extremely dangerous. Microcomputers were once the poor man's computer, video the poor man's film, etc.
On some level Google was, for me, a poor man's internet. My initial use of it for months was for the cached pages which would actually load on my terrible Packard Bell with dial-up in 2000.
I don't think he's being disparaging, but it was definitely an interesting choice of words