Let me start by congratulating you on another excellent article. As usual, I agree with your sentiments, however, again as usual, I'm going to attempt ask you to shift your perpective a little.

Google Accessible Search is a long time coming and I believe that it is the first offering from a mainstream search provider which attempts to provide a quality service to those with with accesibility requirements. I'd like to point out that this is a Google labs project, that you can provide feedback and how I see this product fitting in with whole suite of Google offerings.

Google Labs was established to test and play with some interesting and perhaps non-mainstream ideas. It allows users to see what is happening at the leading edge of search technology and I think that it is important to remember that Lab offerings fall into one of two categories: not-ready for mainstream use or never going to be in mainstream use. From labs.google.com:

Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time. Your feedback can help us improve them. Please play with these prototypes and send your comments directly to the Googlers who developed them.

Google Sets is a great example, it has been a member of Google labs since 2002 and while it seems quite mature and reliable, its utility is probably questionable for the majority of users.

The whole point of Google Labs is to provide the general public with access to play with new technologies, and for Google to get feedback in return. As far as I can recall, only Labs products provide anykind of feedback mechanism. Being something of an optomist, or perhaps I'm just naive, I feel that this feature is meant to be used. I'll be writing a note to them once I finish this comment, and I hope that yourself and other critics from the blogosphere join me.

While agree that using non-standards compliant html is not cool, especially when creating an application for accessibility, I feel the argument that this will alienate all users of non-standard user agents is invalid. I don't want to discount that it is an interesting argument, just that it isn't applicable to this argument.

Something Google does well is to segrigate their products so that they attempt to address different segments with different start pages. This is one of Google's strengths and one of the reasons that they got ahead in the original search engine wars, where their competitors generally tried to fit as many features into one page as possible. To demonstrate my point, may I refer to the following:
google.com/mac
pda.google.com
images.google.com

The list could go on, but I think that makes the point. Google attempts to address each niche seperately. What works in one niche may or may not work in another. Imagine having your image search and content search integrated? Try using google.com effectively on a cell phone. It just doesn't work as well as it should, thus the niches.

Using the argument that because Accesible Search renders results in tables, first adopters and other users of new technology will be alienated is false and perhaps foolish. I wish I have the knowledge to give this falacy a name, but alas. This scenario is like complaining about a lack of performance in your sports car when filled with standard gas when the car was designed to use high-octane. The car will work, just not as well as it should.

I can ask this question, why oh why would a first adoptor use an accessible search rather than one tailored for pda and cell phones? I'll hazard a guess that the results from pda.google.com probably render in a similar manner, and therefore a similar argument can be made against the useability of that service. This can't be confused as being the same argument as the one against Accessible search.

So, my tirade is over for now. Yes, its bad that Google don't use standards compliant code themselves, yes it is especially bad (evil?) when offering an accessible search. But, it is a trial, provide feedback - they want it.