Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.

The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.

I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.

"It was reported in vuln-dev list on May, 20 2000 by SMILER in same time with SMTP buffer overflow in Lotus. I wonder why it's not patched yet."

There is a note to that effect on www.security.nnov.ru.

It's two years since the report, so one might expect a fix in Lotus any time now.