Forbes.com has an interesting article describing the environment over at Google.
From the article: “Hundreds of projects go on at the same time. Most teams throw out new software in six weeks or less and look at how users respond hours later. With 82 million visitors and 2.3 billion searches in a month, Google can try a new user interface or some other wrinkle on just 0.1% of its users and get massive feedback, letting it decide a project’s fate in weeks”. Now thats agile!
You’re right…it’s amazing what type of market share they have captured, and the popularity of the engine.