I should probably mention that I work in search quality at Google. The part I took issue with is "Google can take a couple of seconds if you throw a truly novel

I should probably mention that I work in search quality at Google. The part I took issue with is "Google can take a couple of seconds if you throw a truly novel query at it." which is definitely not true. Google can't cache nearly as much as you would expect, not because the queries change, but because the results change.