Didn’t they pay $150M to one guy who still stole their proprietary self-driving data and sold it to Uber? So maybe not peanuts, but not much more than almonds, either.
Google net income is around $60B yearly (steadily increasing), $5B a month, circa $170 millions every day.
It's only 1% of the total spend here, so I'd say it clearly is peanuts to Google. Spending 1% of a project's budget on a marketing initiative is not particularly exceptional.
Its literally 1% of the balance they're discussing in the post. That's just a goodwill play.