It seems like everything they do are CRUD apps, in the sense that they are concerned with creating, updating, reading, and destroying database records. They are just massively parallelized on the backend to deal with all the traffic.

Sometimes I wonder what all these engineers do every day. Their main apps are not getting exponentially better, and they have fewer of them. Why is all this algorithmic knowledge really needed? Do they spend all day optimizing or engineering and planning new features?

Not trying to insult Google, but I'm not seeing a ton of new features that would justify this kind of indepth theoretical knowledge. The ability to actually code, to do so efficiently and quickly, and to properly unit test and profile it, seems more important than any algorithmic knowledge. Mastery of the toolchain and the language, and that comes down to - "What have you produced?"

Maybe this is why Google hasn't had a new hit product in what seems like awhile. It doesn't need one as long as they maintain their position as search leader, but it doesn't seem like they have one.