I also noticed that someone recently posted a list of publications by Microsoft Research (MSR), presumably to contrast with Google's publication list. MSR does some amazing academic research, but it's not a fair apples-to-apples comparison to compare their publications with Google's, since the primary output of MSR is academic research papers (that's why the lab was founded!), while the primary output of Google is free web-based consumer products :)
for academic research, oftentimes it's not a matter of keeping results secret for years before publishing ... it's simply because the academic peer review and publishing process has such high latency
Is it just me? This list seems too short. Google is (as far as I can tell from outside) a great company in many respects, but their Achilles heel is their obsession with secrecy. It has some advantages, but I fear they may be outweighed by the disadvantages which include lack of early feedback on usability and a susceptibility to NIH syndrome.
But considering they have over 25k employees, it may not seem a lot. But given the depth and quality of such publications, I think it is quite a fair number.
[I'm not a Google employee, but I am a Ph.D. student who has gone through the academic publishing process a few times ...]
Publishing in academic conferences is not the only way to be "non-secret", nor is it the fastest way to get early feedback on usability and systems design issues. In fact, it's a pretty slow way to get feedback. The sorts of conferences that Googlers submit papers to have an acceptance rate of 10% to 25%, which means that most papers get rejected; moreover, it takes a ton of effort to write up and present a paper to an academic audience using writing conventions that are very different than those required to write engineering design documents. Given those low rates of publication "success", it's not surprising that Googlers put their efforts elsewhere.
