Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) invited the press and analysts yesterday to see just how well it is doing. Most people who attended were left with the impression that growth and innovation at the company are not slowing at all.

On the advertising front, according to Reuters, "Tim Armstrong, president of North American advertising sales, said every one of its top 100 advertising accounts was increasing spending with Google."

Google also said it was getting increased penetration of its Gmail and Apps products, both of them aimed at Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) desktop Windows franchise.

One interesting observation made by an analyst from Reuters is that Google did not show off many new products. What it did do was demonstrate improvements to current ones.

This may be a change of direction for the big search company, which has hit the market with everything from Google Earth to its own social network Orkut. Google still maintains its own Finance site for investors and an online retail shopping network.

With the ranks of its employees growing by more than 2,000 people a quarter, Google may have decided to pause and improve what it has. That could be a better way to make money than putting out a new product every week.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

What is Web 2.0? That term has a different meaning for the tech elite than the average consumer. There is one "world wide web" in a general sense, but there are migrations of products to the web in another specific sense. In effect, the openness of the Internet has created an world-changing equalizer, and that equalizer function is starting to show the signs of "shaking up" established industries. This is the basis for the countless Microsoft vs. Google comparisons that are seen almost daily in some form.

What about Office productivity software? You know -- Microsoft's second-largest revenue generator outside the venerable and ubiquitous Windows franchise? Is locally-installed software still needed for this purpose? For complex documents and calculations, there is a large argument that locally-installed software is still king, and will be for some time.

That's not to say that alternatives like OpenOffice are not competitors to Microsoft Office, because they are. To many OpenOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office, and its free. That's huge. But the brand and perceived universal compatibility that Microsoft Office has is overpowering, especially to IT departments charged with installing and maintaining all this stuff, not even counting the millions of home systems with Microsoft Office installed.

Will Google's offerings ever catch up to speed, usefulness, compatibility and universal access to the Microsoft office productivity universe? Some of the bases are already covered -- except one: you must be online to use many "Web 2.0" products and services, if not all of them. Are many of us connected 24/7? You bet we are, unless we're flying or on a mountaintop. Some say that's not healthy and some say it's required for today's business world. If you don't do it, your competitor will. Web 2.0 means online accessibility, all the time. I thought Web 1.0 was the same way, wasn't it?

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

Google closed the trading week at $368.50, a decline of $5.70 or 1.52% from Thursday's close. With this week starting off with a $373+ share price on GOOG shares, a similar pattern developed this week -- a rise and then gradual fall, ending with GOOG down to below $369 per share. It seems that as soon as Google announced that expenses would be higher as a growth item than revenues (see below), GOOG shares began slumping a bit after Google's 10-Q filing with the SEC.

Google said this week in a quarterly 10-Q filing that Google's expenses -- mainly due to data center expansion and some employee compensation increases -- would rise faster than Google's revenue growth rate. This is not new news, but it was clarified in the report with some pretty direct language. This is a good sign, as Google's past secrecy shroud when it came to guidance bit and pieces has been replaced by giving its investors critical expectation information about the financial end of its business.

Although there was a decent amount of news this week concerning Google, one slight piece of communication that may at least quell some concerns by Google AdWords customers was Google's releasing of its specific methodology of its definition of click fraud. This is a problem that some say is overblown while others thing could lead to Google's downfall, making this issue quite decisive in the reader and advertiser communities. Although Google would not release how it calculates the impact of click fraud (for obvious reasons), at least the company is telling its customers what fraud is considered to be and not to be.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

Google shares closed the week at $388.12 on Friday after some wild swings this past week. Friday's last call made GOOG shares saunter up a bit from Thursday's close, as GOOG was up $5.72 or 1.50% from Thursday's close.

With Google having produced superior results last Thursday, its stock sure did not reflect it, as GOOG immediately recovered a little from last Thursday's session after after-bell results were announced, but then GOOG shares started backing down the ladder from that point forward.

With Google shares starting the week off near $392 per share and dipping to $377 during this past Thursday's session, Google finally inched back up to close at $388.12 for the week. Wild rides, I tell you. Is the market still gaga for Google? We'll all see.

Anyway, Google possibly headed off more AdWords customer communication issues by announcing a click fraud assistance project for its advertisers, something that was long overdue. At the same time this week, an Arkansas judge awarded a $90 million settlement to Google advertisers who claim they were bamboozled by Google's inability to police and protect them from click fraud.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications companies, from small business to the Fortune 500 -- but found that he prefers the editing and writing arena and hasn't looked back. Brian is an avid investor and market watcher, and you can read his profile here.

Google closed up today after sinking a bit last week, as GOOG shares traded up to close at $407.89 today, up $4.39 or 1.09% from last Friday's close. With competitor Yahoo! set to report earnings tomorrow after the bell, we'll see what Google-esque words Yahoo! has to say about its largest competitor.

With Yahoo! Finance re-tooling and adding features in response to some added enhancements at Google Finance, you can say that yet again Yahoo! and Google are going head-to-head with the competitive game of cat and mouse.

Google landed a minor court victory when a judge requested the lawsuit brought on by www.kinderstart.com be re-submitted (as opposed to it completely being thrown out). While Google was busy in court defending itself, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said to GOOG investors that capital expenditures this year will be growing -- and probably just as fast as its marketshare and customer growth. What a nice curve that would make, eh?

It looks like Google Finance -- while not all the popular among the online finance customer -- is posing enough future threat to Yahoo that the competitor is enhancing its own finance site -- among the most popular finance portals on the entire web. That is telling, folks. Very telling.

With Google just enhancing its Google Finance page with user-interactive features, Yahoo! does not want its largest adversary to gain any kind of foothold into the on line finance arena. Similar to when Google's Gmail service launched, Yahoo! is being forced to bolster one of its properties to thwart the competition -- and that's what competition is all about: Keeping companies and services innovating.

With Yahoo! Finance about set to deliver real-time stock quotes and stock headlines from around the world, these features will trump a few of the offerings at Google Finance -- but not for long. I am sure Yahoo! will strike back with even more cat-n-mouse games to counter Google Finance's offerings, just like it did with Gmail.

This BusinessWeek article makes several excellent points about all the recent Google products that have been launched recently by the Internet search giant. Too few of these products have received lasting warm welcomes from potential customers after the media hype wore off, leaving these products to sit on a virtual dusty shelf waiting for an audience.

In actuality, many of these products -- like Google Finance and Google Talk -- are fine offerings. They have just not gained any traction against the competition since being released.  Google Talk, for example, is about as simplistic as instant messaging can get, and those fed up with bloated IM programs would find Google Talk a refreshing change.

However, there are audiences in some form for many of Google's services like Google News, which is very popular. While Google likes to aggregate content in categories and display it in simple form to the audience, this strategy is sometimes successful and sometimes now.

So, how are Google's web services like Google Finance and Google News faring against the competition? Not that well.

Although I've written on this topic before, I'm taking another angle, and somewhat in defense (and against) Google here. This article over at ZDNet talks about Google Finance being sorely behind the net's #1 finance site, Yahoo! Finance. Well, there's a little flaw in that argument, seeing as though Yahoo! Finance has been around for more than five years -- and Google just launched its finance site in the last year. Heck in the last six months. It takes time to build an audience, but with a superior product (which I'm not sure Google Finance is), customers will come. Or, will they?

The first-mover advantage that Yahoo! Finance has over Google Finance cannot be understated -- just like the first-mover advantage that Google.com has for leading the pack in Internet search-related advertising revenue. It's hard to see Yahoo! or Microsoft ever catching up to Google's dominance in search advertising. Google was there pretty much first, with a superior product and implementation -- and years of dominance now behind them. This is the polar opposite that Yahoo! Finance has on Google Finance now -- years of leading the pack, Yahoo!'s status as the #1 most-visited web destination in the U.S., and -- for now -- an arguably better product than what Google has in this arena.

Of course, Google has not really marketed Google Finance well at all. And with it being fairly new, the audience is understandably not there yet. Will it ever be there? Google has plenty of work to do to bring customers over to its services. I personally believe Google's Gmail and Google Calendar are far superior to Yahoo!'s offerings, but the customers are just not coming yet. Since Gmail has been around for quite a while (and just recently, accessible to anyone), and with Google Calendar just making its debut, perhaps all this is premature. Let's check back in 2007 then, shall we?