No, most of these do. To build a search engine for example, you need to collect a massive amount of data (say, every web page on the internet), and perform a relatively trivial amount of computation on it (building a TF/IDF term index of each term, computing PageRank, etc.) to build your indexes.

While building a search index is computationally intensive, the number of CPU cycles exercised per GB of data is relatively low. So if you wanted to 'distribute' this problem by farming out the data across a high latency connection to have it processed on another node, and then have it returned to you would actually be slower in many cases than just processing locally on a decent machine.