I recently noticed that there is a task in Task Scheduler that checks for Google updates every hour. This is not that big of a deal, but seems a bit overkill. Is there a real need for Google applications to check for updates 24x per day?

I'v forgotten the command, but you can set this flag on command line, how often you want it to update... As default this is once a day, that is for every 24 hour... So either you have seen wrong or changed this.. or...well perhaps different settings in older versions of chrome ?

disable the update in Task Scheduler;

also check msconfig