Maybe it's your part of the world, but my TTFB to google search pages is less than 150ms and the "generated in x seconds" is usually less than 1 second. That's pretty good for an index searching effectively every public internet page.
I measure from when I hit enter to when my screen is full of results, and just _rendering_ google.com takes a full second on my macbook with 8gb ram and an i5 processor. It's so bad I have a shell script which forces my processor into the 3200mhz range when I'm on my browser workspace. When I'm not looking at my browser (+no downloading files, no audio) the same script sends a SIGSTOP to it so it isn't eating CPU cycles while I'm writing code.
