Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.
Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising.
If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away.
I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.
