0.15 seconds. That's the time it just took Google to return 100 search results from the Web for a random word. Google searches through billions of documents, and it has masses of people using it every second.
13 minutes, 48 seconds. That's the time it just took Microsoft Windows to return 100 search results on this PC for the same random word. My Windows searches through thousands of documents, and it has only a single user today (me).
More than 13 minutes' difference is a long time; if you're working in a hurried office, it's the crucial separation between "Yeah, it works," and "I'll just try to find the document myself."
What separates the first process from the second? It's not only the number of smart engineers caring about search engine technology. It's also the fact that when you're using Google, you're not using your own computer, but the earth's biggest supercomputer instead. This supercomputer is itself made up of tens or hundreds of thousands of smaller computers, spread all over the globe; many perhaps resembling your own computer in power. But connect them, and you end up with the ultimate tool to run applications. Search, it turns out, is just one of these applications—and the Google engineers realized this too, a while ago.
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