Yes I agree you do some cool stuff, and I applaude you for what you have achieved, but you really start to get on my nerves. The reason I am posting this here is: I had such high hopes for you to be a different kind of corporation. - to be able to make the transition from cool startup to cool company. - not to be evil ;-). That's not how I see you now.
First of all, how and why does a company that was started by two guys without a PhD so strongly favorise PhDs when it comes to the recruitement for all research and other "cool" positions. I am halfway through on my own PhD in CS, and honestly I just don't see your point. I mean a PhD is not a magical transformation into a creativity boasting super- hack-thing. Au contraire, I wonder how you are able to keep your engine running with so many PhDs around. There is some truth to the stereotype of the slightly mad and sometimes overly complicated CS academic person. I experience that daily. And then statements like: "We want to hire people who are smarter than those already working for us". Just hire people that have amazing skills, are cool, and enthusiastic. That's what you were built on. Please don't just look at GPA and titles.
Second and that applies not only to you but to all search engine companies, please stop giving us the impression that you know what's going on with your algorithm. Come on there are billions of documents on the Web - and you have an algorithm that ranks those according to millions of different queries. So please tell me - how do you figure out if your algorithm is doing it's job? How? It's all educated guessing. Nothing more.
Third, please G get over it with the "Do not be evil thing". AOL might have had an employee unfortunately release a dataset, but at least they allow you to delete all your personal data. While you do not, and boast about anonymizing our data after several years. And yes you censor in China, and I also remember the story about your employee who you fired for blogging that you are actually not as cool as he imagined you. Yahoo and MS do stuff like this too, but at least they don't pretend to be saints.
And fourth. Please your marketing hype about being different, being still like a startup - you overplay it. You going green, and the sudden popularity of that - a mere coincidence? And yes - sue microsoft for being monopolistic - but at the same time acquire doubleclick and argue it's ok?
Ah, dear G. it might just be that I worked too much and yes I only slept 6 hours in the last three days. Dear G. above all - just stop pretending to be something else.
1. The favoritism for PhD's was probably true in the past, but must certainly be less so now just because Google is growing so large. There aren't that many newly-minted PhD's each year. I know a significant number of people given Google offers right out of undergrad.
2. There are definitely metrics for goodness of search results. Even if you doubt their validity, doing a study by having real people compare results across search engines (blind) and choosing the results they like best can tell you whether Google's preferred to Yahoo!.
3. "Don't be evil" isn't the same thing as "don't ever, ever do anything that could be interpreted as evil by someone." I think the idea is more to try to be a good company in general. Hard decisions like censoring in China will always have to be made, though.
4. They're pretty different in terms of their perks and company culture from your standard company. I think you're being a bit brash re: the going green stuff. That is actually part of the culture--GOOG's had measures to incent environmental stuff for a while. It's not all announced in press releases, however. As for the MSFT/DoubleClick issue, you may be drawing a bit of a false analogy.