Thanks for your comments Dan. Yes, you're right. I will send them my feedback and as I said, I am encouraged that they have a mechanism for it.

On your point about my tables criticism, what I said was:

[There is] a substantial and growing base of users that don’t all fall into the category of “Visually Impaired” who could benefit hugely from the functions of the new accessible search, as long as their devices can wade through the tag soup surrounding the search results themselves.

Stripping it down to basics:

1. You don't have to have a disability to run into accessibility problems, just a non-standard user agent;
2. The functionality of Google Accessible Search should be good for such users since it helps them avoid sites with deprecated code;
3. Deprecated code will not always stop you dead in your tracks, but it may slow you down to a crawl.

I take the last point to be implicit in my statement, but there nevertheless since I said "as long as their devices can wade through the tag soup." So I don't see anything fallacious in that. It's actually in agreement with your objection!

One final thing. Google can do it right: www.google.com/pda is valid HTML 4.01 Transitional, and the markup uses semantic principles. Google Accessible Search does not validate as HTML anything (since it has no DOCTYPE), contains errors that would prevent it from validating if it did have a DOCTYPE, and mostly ignores semantic principles.

Validation is not the be-all and end-all of accessibility, but it's a pretty good baseline. And in this case it supports the argument that using Accessible Search with a PDA might be a pain in the arse. In truth, Accessible Search and PDA Search should accomplish the same thing, because if they did the users would all be better off.