The article doesn't seems to be worth to be published in NY Times. The $4.7B was computed based on how much the Google's revenues increased since 2008 when Google News was bringing in $100M per year. Oh, how accurate this study must be....
Hi, the pricing depends on the feature set that the clients require (articles/events/trends, amount of data, frequency of access) - that is why we don't offer it directly on the site.
Also, you are able to create an account for free (without CC) and make 2000 searches for free.