I think the point is that people often use the wrong tools thinking they have "big data" and therefore they must use the same techniques someone like Google use

I think the point is that people often use the wrong tools thinking they have "big data" and therefore they must use the same techniques someone like Google uses. The difference is most likely Google has many orders of magnitude more data and does many more orders of magnitude processing on it. I think it is useful to have some rules of thumb as to when you need to apply more exotic techniques and tools vs. something where simple stuff works. So in that sense asking do you have "big data" or not can be useful...