Observers: Google Should Focus on Search

Exterior view of Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006. The Internet company reports earnings Thursday. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) (Paul Sakuma - AP)

NEW YORK -- To say business is "very, very good" at Google Inc. might even be an understatement, but that's how Chief Executive Eric Schmidt kicked off a post-earnings conference call with analysts Thursday.

Google reported a profit that nearly doubled on revenue that soared 70 percent to $2.69 billion. Search got better, Schmidt said. Ads got better. The number of Google users grew. And the company's innovation engine, as he called it, launched products, many products, a "blizzard" of products "confusing to almost everyone," including some that may one day challenge Microsoft Corp.'s office-software dominance.

Investors rejoiced, sending the stock above $450 in after-hours trading. By Friday afternoon, Google's stock had gained $31.76, or 7.5 percent, to $457.82 on the Nasdaq.

Imagine you're Google right now: darling of Wall Street, $10 billion dollars in the bank, the brand-new owner of one of the hottest video-sharing sites on the map. You think big, and say things like, "We want to be the easiest company in the world for advertisers to do business with," as co-founder Larry Page did during the conference call.

What would other high-tech entrepreneurs do now if they were running Google?

"Buy an airplane," laughed David Sifry, founder and chief executive officer of Technorati Inc., a start-up search engine for the blogosphere.

But wait, David, Google already has an airplane.

"Buy another!"

Sifry wasn't actually being serious. While some may accuse today's start-up entrepreneurs of living large in Bubble 2.0 conditions, given the chance to stand in Google's shoes, most kept a conservative focus on improving the company's core businesses.

"There's so much work that needs to be done around search," Sifry said, for real this time. If he were Google, he'd spend the next five years working on "a Google of intention," driven by users' real-time needs. For example, he said, imagine he's standing on a street corner in San Francisco, and decides he wants a pizza. He could float that idea out to the Google of intention, maybe via his blog. Within moments, nearby pizza vendors would respond with bids for Sifry's business.

Nick Denton, publisher of the blog network company Gawker Media, wrote in an e-mail, "I would get search working, because the results are cluttered with commercial rubbish that ought really to be in the advertising zone. Try doing a search in a category such as travel, for instance, for Barcelona hotels. It's useless."

Denton wrote that Google search results would improve if they included links to archived newspaper, magazine and blog articles. "Buy the digital archive rights to every publication in the country. Buy Lexis-Nexis if necessary," he wrote.