Looks like the relationship is about to get more serious. According to this interview with Marc Benioff, Google and Salesforce are going to make a big announcement today at Tour De Force in Santa Clara.

It looks like they will announce a growing partnership in terms of their application platform. As you know Google also has their own application platform: Google App Engine. Like the Force.com platform, it allows developers to build applications on a hosted environment. So developers don’t need to worry about the infrastructure and hosting, they can just build their application and let the platform take care of the rest.

My guess is that there will be some integration announcement with Force.com and Google App Engine. Or perhaps they will announce a partnership to create an online market place for hosted apps. (kinda like App Exchange, but for apps even if they don’t integrate with CRM). I really don’t know, I’m just guessing here.