For what it's worth, I was thinking the same thing. I don't feel this way about Google hiring programmers in general, but I think at this point they've hired some significant double-digit percentage of the world-class machine learning professors in the world, and as I understand it those people don't publish (many) papers anymore.
Thanks, I didn't know about that. But you'll probably agree that it's unimpressive: 270 publications (and that appears to be all-time, going back 10 years) for a team of 515 researchers. In academia, you'd expect several per year per researcher.
