You seem to denigrate being an "advertising company" as if all the work is exceedingly simplistic. I have a friend who recently moved into their ad division from a "sexier" one, and he said the amount of specialization being used in there is mind boggling. Which completely makes sense at the scale of Google, where some random team boosting your ad revenue by "only" .05% can be a worthwhile endeavor.
Oh no, it's not simplistic. I actually worked on it at Google for a few years. The backends are actually quite impressive and Rube Goldberg like. It's just not what starry eyed fresh grads want to do when they join, and it's most definitely something that Google wants to be way in the background outside shareholder meetings.
