Ho appena provato questo su google code playground:

codice:
<!--
  copyright (c) 2009 Google inc.

  You are free to copy and use this sample.
  License can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/faq/#license
-->

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>Google AJAX Search API Sample</title>
    <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=AIzaSyA5m1Nc8ws2BbmPRwKu5gFradvD_hgq6G0" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    /*
    *  How to load jQuery and then use the Search API with it.
    */
    
    google.load("jquery", "1.4");
    
    // on page load complete, fire off a jQuery json-p query
    // against Google web search
    function OnLoad(){
      $jarray = [];
      $jarray.push ($('#content'));
      
      $jarray[0].text('hello... ').hide();
      $jarray[0].delay(1000).fadeIn(400);
      
      /*
      $('#content').text('hello... ').hide();
      $('#content').delay(1000).fadeIn(400);
      */
    }
    
    google.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad);
    </script>
  </head>
  <body style="font-family: Arial;border: 0 none;">
    <div id="content">Loading...</div>
  </body>
</html>
sia usando l'array sia usando l'oggetto jquery direttamente il delay viene applicato.