Interesting phenomenon

Even though Google used SOAP RPC, which is widely agreed to be the
easiest way to use SOAP, it was still the case that people hand-coded
wrappers for most of the languages that Google did not ship wrappers for
explicitly. (Perl was one exception) 

This means that probably only a tiny fraction of all Google users were
coding calls to a SOAP library. The rest wouldn't know nor care what the
underlying protocol is. It could be UDP for all they care.

 Paul Prescod