I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: spee

I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain. So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.