The iconography of all information everywhere

Google's mission statement is "...to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Does that make this new, scary favicon that showed up this week the new icon of collective human knowledge?  

No, no it doesn't.  

But seeing as how pervasive it can be, I have the question the intent of the design. It's hard enough for Google to do pixel-scale stuff with their serif typeface (the previous icon had it's work cut out for itself). But did they really need this mash-up of corporate colors?