Are they trying to be everything to everyone? It seems everything in the last two years has been unfocused, and consequently, ineffective. (Go is an exception.)
At its heart, a corporation is just a pile of money that hires people to make itself bigger somehow. The expectation that it confine itself to a few related lines of business is a reaction to the fad in the 1960s of making leveraged buyouts of arbitrary companies to game the share price of the resulting conglomerate.
This is a search engine optimized for searching for a very specific type of information. Then they've tacked on a way to monetize those searches. What could be more 'core' to Google than that? As such it seems to be the most focused product they've released in a while.