Hm, if I understand their product correctly they are building a DB and their filtering actually returns correct results.

So, the analogy doesn't really hold true unless you actually have these trillions of alternate products stored in your brain and manage to cite the matching subset on demand.

Seemingly, their way of thinking goes roughly like this:

If I have 10 billion rows in an SQL database, with a UNIQUE index, and do SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE pk=<number>, then I have “processed” 10 billion rows.

If I do 10k of these queries per second, I have processed 100T rows per second.