I think the Google angle has been overblown. Sure, all the designers are from Google, but Google employs a number of people who are prominent in one language or another - Guido, for one, and Bram Moolenaar is working on Zimbu. It got posted to reddit by one of the Google people as "from Google", and the first talk was done at Google, so I think everyone just made an assumption. Google is nowhere on the front page of golang.org, and the developers are using @golang.org addresses.

I bet the developers are surprised at the media storm and wouldn't have otherwise gotten it except for that initial Reddit post explicitly tying it to Google.