It has been awhile, but MSR used to be the place where people went and still published, while Google Labs was a black hole. I remember some Google guy giving a talk at NIPS, but it was just a presentation from a shared corporate slide deck, which did not fit in with the rest of the conference. Google attracted some really good machine learning folks (temporarily) by offering them boatloads of money and manpower to implement their ideas, not freedom to publish. Has that changed?
I don't know what you're talking about; Google researchers publish all the time and give presentations at machine learning conferences with plenty of interesting and unique detail. Google just didn't do much with machine learning in the old days- the pubs were mostly system infrastructure and data analysis.
Here's an oldie but a goodie:
http://people.mbi.ohio-state.edu/datta.53/philtalk.pdf
note the talk refers readers to the patent. At the time, reading Google's patents was the best strategy to learn what it was doing.
Yup, Google now has two teams publishing the very best ML papers alongside FAIR, Toronto, Montreal and some other places. The teams or Deep Mind and Google Brain.
