I suspect some of these might be obvious to people close to Google but I'm intensely curious.

There was a time when if you were not from Stanford you didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting hired. Obviously as Google grew this requirement flew out the window, but they are still extremely biased against people from "lesser" colleges, even ones who have impressive portfolios and experience. In my experience academics is one of the poorest indicators of actual work performance you can use.

Note that this isn't sour grapes :P Google recruits heavily from my college (lucky me?), but I generally dislike companies that assign too much weight to academics. This includes NVidia, which enforces a strict minimum-GPA requirement on all hires, but I digress.

During my interview my interviewer seemed to really have a problem because I wasn't a die-hard Google fanatic. At the time I had a Gmail account that was idle most of the time, I didn't do the Google home page bit (my google experiences are strictly vanilla), and outside of Google Maps my interaction with G-products are relatively limited. He didn't seem to take that so well.

I ask because if you applied for a Sysadmin (or somesuch) position, I can see your lack of usage of Google products as fairly irrelevant. But if you were going for some sort of product development post, I can see why your interviewer might be somewhat uninterested in you.