"I can't think of many things that I would want to work on that aren't the moonshot crazy experimental projects (and, let's face it, most people won't be working on them)."
This is true of almost everyone, of course.
Every year i read the incoming intern abstracts, and they all literally say the same thing "I really would like to work on <whatever really popular crazy project was in the news lately>". Literally all of them.
That said, often you can work on them if you are good enough at what you do.
(But yes, often you have to prove that first, either internally or externally)
Are there ever new, fast-moving projects at Google? That's the core of my perception - I don't want to work on Google Docs, Gmail, etc. etc. or other large, established projects. I want to work on something small, iterate quickly, etc. - but to the outsider, I don't see any Google products doing that.
There are lots of them, but they tend to get canceled early. As an outsider, you only see projects once they've reached some baseline threshold of viability - a large number of projects never reach that, not because Google says they can't but just because they're bad ideas to begin with.
I spent about half my time at Google working on mundane improvements to search - visual redesigns, feature unification, infrastructure improvements - and half working on crazy green-field projects. Most of the crazy stuff was eventually canceled, and the stuff that did launch (eg. Google Authorship) ended up being a lot more toned-down than we initially envisioned. Ultimately I think I learned more from the crazy projects, but it's a very different kind of learning, much more experiential than factual.
The other thing you learn when you actually succeed at a crazy new idea is that people build up a tolerance to them really quickly. The first time we did an interactive doodle on the home page (PacMan...actually technically that was the second, but it was the first people noticed), everybody went wild, it was in all the newspapers, and we calculated people spent 4.82 million hours playing it. Now when an interactive doodle comes out, most people don't even notice. Remember that Google Docs, GMail, etc. were revolutionary in their day; it's only because they've become successful that you don't want to work on them.
There are, but as you might expect when a project like that gets started, even the smell of it attracts a lot of people. I can't say that anything I've seen at Google iterates quickly compared to where I've worked before. It's just not a company built for quick iteration -- between the code reviews and style guide and readability restrictions, a lot of discussion around design docs, interacting with a lot of other teams, etc.
This is true of almost everyone, of course. Every year i read the incoming intern abstracts, and they all literally say the same thing "I really would like to work on <whatever really popular crazy project was in the news lately>". Literally all of them.
That said, often you can work on them if you are good enough at what you do.
(But yes, often you have to prove that first, either internally or externally)