Crossing into personal attack is not ok in HN comments, and we've had to ask you at least once before not to do this.
I'm not going to ban your account right now because it doesn't look like you've recently been making a habit of doing this, but please don't do it again. Your comment would be fine without the first two sentences.
The prize is $5m. I wouldn't call that peanuts. How much do you think they spent on fluff and buzz? Doesn't seems like that much to me. A couple assets don't break the bank.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I think your comment is rude, and naive in that it misses the point. The investment here is small relative the the marketing budget, which tells us something about their priorities.
I would very much like to know how to make one person spend only one day to set the whole thing up, including setting up a new domain, allocating/pointing to a web server, finding the pictures with the correct resolution and apply modification, creating the illustrations, making sure that "sign in" button at the top actually works, setting the background gradient in such a way that it is complaint with the company design language, designing and implementing "The Qubit Game" [0], designing and implementing the fancy "our quantum journey" interactive page [1], etc, in a company as large as Google. I am really curious who this Superman at Google is, who can do both design work and dev work and creating educational materials, get all things approved and reviewed and shipped within a day, and ensure links don't break to this day.
If you think setting this up is simple you have no idea how big corporations make decisions like this. Even if the actual website setup was simple, many people will have been involved and the 'marketing cost' has to account for the time of senior staff deciding on the goals of the project (which seem largely about PR, at least to me). It's not just the cost of a single web dev hacking a few pages together.
