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It's possible that "good kerning" interacts with factors like distance from screen and font size. So you cannot isomorphically scale up. That would mean Google would actually need different kerning for different contexts.

That sounds like the kind of a data-driven, "42 shades of blue" approach Google is known for. :) There was a kerning game on Hacker News a while ago. The player's goal was to arrange the letters of a word to the "correct" kerning. Now imagine something like that at Google scale, like captchas or the Google Image tag matchin game.

Strange, I really felt like Google's kerning was too far apart.