9:59am - Eric is placing a pretty good emphasis on using Google from anywhere, using any device - and he's making a pretty good BlackBerry mobile search example as well as taking a virtual vacation to Mt. Everest using Google Earth -- since he says he too much of a wimp to go there in person. He said a funny...

10:05 am - Eric is talking about the 70/20/10 rule -- and specifically about the "20" piece, which is the 20% of time Google engineers get to spend on pet projects -- many of which have turned into hugely-successful public projects.

10:07am - Eric specifially mentions Yahoo! and Microsoft as the main competitors it has -- and that it is good for Google, in order to keep them on their toes. He's then talking about partners AOL and eBay being perfect for giving customers what they want, when they want -- where all partners succeed from the strategy of such partnerships.

10:12am - Eric is now talking about heavy heavy investment in search algorithms -- making more search local, more relevant, more scalable with web use growth, etc. He's also talking about the algorithms being driven by user requests and experience. The customers are the builders, he says.

10:16am - Eric is talking about Google radio ads and he again is making a huge emphasis on mobile marketing -- there are hundreds of millions more wireless devices capable of search as there are computers. Mobile devices will be used for finding instead of searching. That's a great point...

10:20am - Eric's now talking about device and content convergence across all information access devices: TV, radio, the PC, mobile phones, etc. Google's models is meant to scale to all of these mediums -- and they don't see any limits in the Google system as it stands today.

10:21am - Eric concludes his presentation by saying -- "we've only just begun".

10:24am - Alan Eustace -- a Google search head in engineering -- takes the stage to talk about specifics of how Google search works; relevancy, speed, process, device presentation, etc.

10:28am - Alan is talking about search freshness, web crawl frequency, and having more results as all the competitors -- and Google is ahead by a factor of 3 at this time. 10% to 20% of the web changes every month -- and all that must be fresh on every web crawl by Google.

10:32am - Alan mentions that manually optimizing search pages by Google can't be scaled. Also, 25% of all queries that Google processes have never been seen before, which is huge. Also, thousands of Google machines are involved in processing a single result -- with full redundancy. This gives speed and relevancy that competitors can't match.

10:35am - Alan is talking about how Google internally measures itself as well as how the competitors measure Google -- and it constantly gets better at what it does.

10:38am - Alan wraps up his piece of the presentation and takes questions from the press audience. The first question involves "mobile search" and Alan talks about Google's use of transcoding the entire web for the mobile interface instead of just giving customers the limited mobile phone-optimized pages. Alan also takes a question about video serving and how to make that kind of content accessible and presentable as more and more video gets pushed to the web.

10:44am - Elliot is back on stage talking about the WiFi being down in the room again. Perhaps it's a Google-spiracy -- they don't want live blogging right in the room, perhaps?

10:48am - Omid Kordestani, SVP of Google Sales, takes stage with his sales team from across the globe -- from Europe, PacRim and the Americas.

11:11am - the sales team is finished and is taking questions from the audience before a 30-minute break.

-- break --

11:40am - Google press day continues...Jonathan Rosenberg and Marissa Mayer take stage. These are the folks charged with product management and the user experience.

11:45am - Jonathan's talking about the advent of Google News -- and how it was originally conceived to be an aggregate news site -- unfettered by editors and making the world's news information available from all over the globe.

11:48am - Marissa is talking all innovation -- relevance, user experience, quality and quantity of results. It's all user interface, she says. Creating the best search experience is the core driver -- could not agree more.

11:50am - the mic goes back to Jonathan to talk about advertising platforms. This is, in my opinon, the gas that drives Google's car. What am I saying -- everyone says this!

11:54am - Jonathan is talking more about advertising from global partnerships to local vendors who can use Google ads to sell products and services targeted specifically to their locale.

11:56am - Marissa is back on stage talking about "innovate and launch early and often", as opposed to perfecting every single detail before user launch -- let the innovation after launch be based on what customers day. This is the famed rule I call "launch at 80%, because if you launch at 100%, you'll never launch". This is good to hear from the user experience lead at Google.

12:01pm - Jonathan is demoing Google Local (with satellite images) on a BlackBerry wireless handheld. Sweet.

12:08pm - Jonathan announces "Google Trend", a new service with similarities to zeitgeist. Pretty neat -- and spooky -- new feature.

12:11pm - Marissa is back (again, this is a tag-team like no other) talking about the evolution of Google Desktop -- and it's eerily similar to Yahoo! Widgets. She calls them "Google Gadgets".

12:16pm - Marissa is talking about Google Co-op -- and she's emphasizing a Google Health co-op service, which features a refined set of search results for this particular subset of customer search (health). Interesting stuff...

12:23pm - Google Press Day 2006 is near-complete with a Q&A session for Jonathan and Marissa -- including some webcast questions.

12:39pm - We're spent! The webcast concludes at 1:15pm after an executive Q&A. Stay tuned to goog.bloggingstocks.com tomorrow where we will live blog the annual shareholder's meeting. Buh-bye!