1. This is a very limited subset of conferences/fields.
2. Google Research is younger than Microsoft Research.
3. Google Research is really mixed with their product development whereas Microsoft (and IBM) Research are more isolated so they can focus on fundamental research and publications (there is some transfer...). A Google representative once said in a software engineering conference: "Come work at Google Research, you'll work on real and interesting research problems like GMail". Gmail==Research? Really?
I don't know if GMail itself is "research", but I'm sure there is definitely a lot of systems research going on behind the scenes. I don't know that they use it for GMail, but the Google File System paper was interesting. Allowing their users (millions?) to quickly search their email (tens to hundreds of thousands?) must have some interesting networking/distributed systems research questions.
That said, some more publications/insight on those systems would be nice to see.
