The approximate budget for the intelligence community (the collection of sixteen agencies dealing with intelligence as part of the federal budget) is something in the neighborhood of $75 billion. Signals intelligence gets over 90% of that budget. The NSA is the largest of the signals intelligence agencies (the other ones being the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency).
So let's assume that the NSA gets the lion's share of nearly $70 billion, say $30-35 billion, as its annual operating budget. It also gets access to things money can't buy: classified technologies, crytographic techniques, secret knowledge of physical infrastructures, etc.
Google, on the other hand, has no (or extremely limited) access to state secrets (either those of the U.S. or of foreign countries), and it has an annual income of about $6.5 billion--one fifth that of the NSA.
The NSA doesn't utterly dwarf Google, but on the other hand they have some substantial advantages that Google simply cannot match.
So let's assume that the NSA gets the lion's share of nearly $70 billion, say $30-35 billion, as its annual operating budget. It also gets access to things money can't buy: classified technologies, crytographic techniques, secret knowledge of physical infrastructures, etc.
Google, on the other hand, has no (or extremely limited) access to state secrets (either those of the U.S. or of foreign countries), and it has an annual income of about $6.5 billion--one fifth that of the NSA.
The NSA doesn't utterly dwarf Google, but on the other hand they have some substantial advantages that Google simply cannot match.