Google: The Beta Company

Yet again Google is releasing another cool tool: TV searches. This allows you to search the closed captioning text that shows up on TV shows. Kind of cool, but since it only records a paragraph at a time it doesn't give you quite enough information.

Is it just me or does Google not know what the word beta means? It appears that the only services that they have actually released are Web search and Image search. Everything else is in beta:
Google News
Froogle
Gmail
Google Desktop
Google Print
Google Local
Google Groups
Google APIs
Google Scholar

Google News has been out for over a year. Groups, News, Froogle and Desktop links show up on the main google page. I have no idea what the beta label means besides you can't sue us if it doesn't work because it is "just in Beta". Usually a company leaves software in beta for a month and only lets some people test it out. Not google. They release everything to everyone and then leave it in beta forever.

So then I thought maybe I don't understand what the word beta means, so obviously I Googled the word beta. And what was the #1 hit? MSN Search. Go figure.