Google invests heavily into basic computer science reseach, and Google researchers are well represented at respected conferences and in high impact journals in their subfields. So yes, one can do 'actual "research" projects' at Google. We have an entire research organization doing just that, often in collaboration with academia:
https://research.google/
However, not everyone working on experimental projects at Google is doing what one might call "research". For some, such as myself, the line can be blurry, but I'm firmly in a development camp, as are most people I know. To put it succinctly for me, as for many others, the job isn't to publish papers or present results, it's to write software of value to Google. However, we have considerable latitude to investigate new and innovative ways of writing that software.
Of course, that also entails taking lessons learned from systems outside of the mainstream.
It's true that Barret still works on Akaros: it was his PhD thesis topic. However, Google is no longer investing in it directly.
- Dan C.
Dan, does that mean you are allowed to have actual "research" projects
at google? i just never thought something like this would be possible,
and never realized akaros happened at google itself. i imagined the
involvement of universities instead, but i clearly didn't check
closely enough.
I hear only bad news from google lately, but if they give enough
freedom to also do basic research (or let's call it OS development
cause IT research is an oxymoron) that's great news to me indeed :)
And as you said all i know of google is their web site. or knew, cause
many useful services like google code search are no more. at least
google mail still works :P
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