Google publishes a lot of papers in AI, networking, and kernel-type work (isolation, scheduling, etc.). This seems to attract a lot of talent and helps build relationships with academia.
For whatever reason though, the storage and analytics groups don't publish nearly as much as they could.
Bigtable folks wrote a follow-up paper to the original, but it was turned down by the conference's reviewers for not being novel enough or something like that, so the team just went ”ok, whatever..." and moved on. Years later, there were a couple of talks by Carter and Phaneendhar at the HBase conference that might have been hosted at Google NY.
For whatever reason though, the storage and analytics groups don't publish nearly as much as they could.