I believe Google has a practice where all projects that are copyright assigned to them are under github.com/google: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing

It's not a hard requirement, but they do make you jump through extra hoops to put them elsewhere.

Are there any officially supported Google products under github.com/google ?

Are there any officially supported Google products?

Even if there aren't, it makes sense to clarify to media that this is an open source project made without any business commitments. I've seen other businesses do something similar; internally it reduces friction with the business admin when devs want to open source something.

Google still sells ads, doesn't it?

Didn't they originally claim to never show ads in search given that it is in direct opposition to search results quality? Back in the days when Pagerank was hot.

That was in the original pagerank publications. Google had lots of other early attempts to make money that avoided advertising (like the search appliance [0]), but the firehose of money from ads dwarfed anything else they could ever find and that early Google didn't last long.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

Was that a "business commitment" or a "user commitment"?

Would Google Guice count?

https://github.com/google/guice

The code is owned by Google because it was written by a Google employee on the job.

Or off the job -- Google claims ownership either way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969979

IIUC you can request exception and have your own personal projects, you're just supposed to be transparent about it. Your request will be rejected if it completes with Google business (like if you're making a new collaborative email and docs solution), but otherwise I've not heard any sob stories.

That would be one more huge reason not to work for them.

Because Google owns the code.