Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is starting to place its advertising all over its web-based products as it tries desperately to gain ad revenue outside of its web search results.

In what has been a long time coming, the world leader in internet search will now be tailoring ads for its search product specifically for smaller screens like those on the Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone and the Google-powered G1 smartphone, offered by T-Mobile.

This makes sense. A web search performed on a standard web browser brings up text ads that bring in billions of revenue for Google every quarter. On smartphones with full web browsers but with a lack of screen real estate, these ads work but are sub-optimal. If Google can get this right and make text ads next to search results look like they belong on small-screen web browser, it will have significantly upped its ante.

Will customers click (with their fingers, no less) on mobile ads set next to mobile search results on these full-featured phones? The law of averages suggests they will, most likely. As iPhones sell in more volume and smartphones eventually become the mobile device of choice, mobile advertising will become a decent income stream for Google and other mobile ad networks.

At least, that is Google's dream. So far, mobile ads are miniscule in income generation compared to standard web search income generation -- even with many more phones in use than computers with standard web browsers.

Say it isn't so: Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) may be tightening its always-loose belt and reigning in costs as the economy tries to pick its way out of a recession. The company that prepares free gourmet lunches for employees and gives extraordinary time for employees to develop pet projects is pulling things into reality a bit.

Revenue growth at the search giant has slowed in the last year, as even internet advertising has slowed down in the face of a prolonged economic crunch that we're experiencing. Like many of us here at BloggingStocks have said for years, almost all of Google's revenue comes from online advertising. It was late to the game in trying to develop other revenue sources (yes, even a year makes a difference), and the incremental gains the company has seen in revenue still mostly revolve around some form of advertising. What happens when customers have no budget to advertise?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that "We have to behave as though we don't know" (what's going to happen). Google will be cutting efforts to projects that have not caught on, aren't generating revenue and
also cutting back efforts on products that aren't exciting. Google's leader indicated that the company needs to "prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." That's great, except the "ads" part..

Google still has the model of envy when it comes to ad-based online revenue, but now it's having to stretch ads into more of its properties, like Google Finance and Google News. Can Google find more revenue engines than those small text ads that appear next to its search results? It has to -- it can't continue the same way of generating its cash flow and expect things to turn out alright in the future. Is Google a one-trick pony? Could be, although it's still too early to tell.

As Doug noted a few days ago, shares in Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) have dropped to 52-week lows and then some. It's no surprise -- Google has joined just about every public company in the stock market freefall this year. But now, the company's shares have gone below the $300 mark for the first time since 2005. Is the company doomed?

Of course not. Google has very little debt and billions in cash to do whatever it wants. It, of course, won't be immune from the online advertising slowdown that's in progress and will get worse. Still, if analyst pundits think businesses can just stop advertising and expect the same business activity, that's a huge fallacy. Google will still remain one of the best advertising destinations, even as businesses squeeze their marketing budgets as much as they can.

Google's shares are off more then 50% this year, but this doesn't change the fact that Google's financial fundamentals are completely sound. But, of course, doom and gloom predictors are coming out of the woodwork with the guesswork on what Google's 2009 profit outcomes could be (flip a coin, anyone?). Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal told Yahoo! that "we believe that the high CPC (costs-per-click) inflation Google has been experiencing for the past six quarters is not sustainable and will pressure core search growth". Of course it won't be sustainable. But Google isn't going to hurt unless it stays this way for 24 months or more.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is talking to Verizon Wireless in an effort to replace Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) as the default mobile search provider on the second-largest wireless network in the U.S. Why does Microsoft want this? Because, it has lost the web search business to Google on the PC screen -- so perhaps it thinks it can compete better (or win) the web search race on the cellphone screen.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reminded the world that Google's next large focus is on the mobile market. Although mobile search and mobile web browsing has taken a while to gain steam, the sheer number of mobile devices with internet connectivity dwarfs the PC market. Google and Microsoft are both licking their chops over this one.

So, it's kind of like entering the web search market back in 1988 here -- whichever company can seal as many deals to become the de-facto mobile search and information portal for major wireless companies will own the space. It's the same argument that has stood for a while in the PC market: consumers will use whatever default software or services offered on the device they just bought. Why type in "google.com" on your cellphone or smartphone keypad if Microsoft's search is right there waiting for you? Seeing that Verizon Wireless doesn't have an outside partnership for mobile web searches, this may be a huge battle that gets little attention -- but that doesn't mean it's not important.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) can finally put a goofy litigious chapter behind it. It can now get back to the business of scanning books in its effort to make anything ever printed available digitally. Google's book scanning project is intended for one thing, and one thing only: profit-generation while enabling readers to have access to any book from almost any web browser anywhere on earth.

Google will settle two copyright lawsuits for $125 million and then will continue to scan in books and make them available for purchase electronically. Book publishers and authors will, of course, receive advertising revenue and other revenue as a result of Google's efforts. Google will, of course, get a cut of the action as well. I'm not sure of the scale here, but if Google reached just a small portion of readers across the globe and eeked out a buck or two from each one, there's some massive revenue generation for you. Nice business if you can get it.

In addition, Google certainly hopes to convert authors still demanding the physical printing of authored works to the digital side, where even more revenue can be generated. The generation who reads newspapers, carry books with them and does calculations by hand is being replaced by the generation who has everything online from anywhere they go and run a completely digital life. The distribution method is the internet for these folks, and the content must be there as well. There's something nostalgic about taking a nice book with you to read in a quiet place (that is, if you can find a quiet place). But, for those multitasking Gen-Yers, information flows only digitally -- and Google wants to make sure you find what you need through it.

If you're a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) user, you probably enjoy the relatively high quality of the company's products at t cost of -- zero. How does Google give all this away for free, you ask? It's the same as any other company on the web that features quality products at no cost. The cost is your privacy. You are paying, and paying big.

Do you mind? It's hard to say what kind of personal, financial and psychological profile Google has on millions of its customers, but you can believe that this massive marketing database exists. How Google manages this will be the most important decision in the company's young, decade-old existence, but the question remains: do many of us sell our souls for freebies? Every time you sign up for something free but fill out a complete demographic profile to get it, you're selling out. Google is doing nothing different -- but its scale is so huge that all this data controlled by one entity does cause for concern among the informed consumer inside us all. It should, anyway.

Google, like anyone in business who is savvy, knows that giving away products or services for "free" on the front end is made up for on the back end. In other words, would you rather pay for every single product or service you use and not have any entity know how to market to you -- or would you rather get a good majority of your products and services at no cost but with the attached condition that there are many entities out there that know you better than you know yourself?

More importantly, they know how to push your exact buttons to have you behaving like a robotic consumer or a slot machine junkie? With the U.S. consumer responsible for two-thirds of economic activity (as little as that is at the moment), the harnessing of this kind of power becomes clear. Okay, I'm off to perform a Google search...

Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube continues to take the lion's share of the online video market. Although startup Hulu.com -- which will broadcast the U.S. Presidential candidate debate live tonight -- has come on strong, YouTube has it. Everyone from teens with $69 digital cameras to professional videographers are uploading video footage to the site.

Google announced recently that it was upping the file size of uploaded video to the site as well -- by a factor of 10. Going from 100 Megabytes to 1 Gigabyte per uploaded video is amazing in and of itself, but this will make YouTube all the more attractive to those who want to take rather exhaustive video and upload it for all to see while not being constrained.

For example, five minutes of video on a standard digital camera (just an average, of course) will easily eat up 100 Megabytes of storage. Since we're not all video compression experts, Google -- with this change -- has just allowed its online video universe to expand in a huge way.

In addition to the video file size increase, YouTube's new uploader will allow multiple file uploads at the same time. This is also a rather large change from the "upload and wait" scenario of the past. Although Google surely wants to make more money from the massive amount of video viewed every minute on YouTube, giving regular customers the ability to have larger videos (and several at one) uploaded should just push it that much further in front of the online video pack. What it needs now is to lift the 10-minute limitation for non-partners. But then again, that would invite a whole new universe of copyright piracy. Maybe.

InterActive Corp.'s (NASDAQ: IACI) search engine and information portal Ask.com continues to try and re-invent itself to compete more heavily with search leader Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). With Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) being such a large distraction over this past summer, the time seemed appropriate for Ask.com to try -- again -- to take some steam from Google. From anyone, for that matter.

It still won't happen. Here's why: Google's search product still is compelling to all that use it, even with marginally better search products. Google also has its hand in news, email, documents, spreadsheet, blogs, etc., and continues to recruit the customer that uses Google for everything possible on the web.

Its main product is search and that also provides almost all its revenue. But how can Ask.com compete with something like this? A better product, faster search results, or a more intuitive experience won't cut it any longer. What Ask.com would need is a disruptive product to even think about competing with Google. It's been over a few years since I've written on Ask.com's foray into competing with Google. In many ways, it's superior. That's, unfortunately, no longer enough.

Is Ask.com trying to win a losing battle? Perhaps. When Ask.com CEO Jim Safka says that Ask.com can recruit web searchers from Google with a 30% speed increase in search results, he's deluding himself. I'm not sure where that research came from, but Ask.com may be on its last stand. The search engine is pulling in ad revenue from the use of its products, and it may be content to grow steadily in that arena for the time being. But if it really wants to attack Google's ad revenue cash cow, something completely innovative and fresh needs to be forthcoming.

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) were named as two of the top companies in customer satisfaction recently by an ACSI index released out of the University of Michigan. This is the same study that pounded U.S. automakers in favor of foreign auto brands.

In the index that measured e-business companies, two of the most powerful brands in technology rose to the top. It's no surprise Apple made the top of the list, with its capability to mesmerize iPod, iTunes and iPhone customers. The company is also selling more Macintosh computers than ever -- and customers are buying them as fast as Apple can make them.

It's also hard to think that any web company can catch Google. The world's largest internet search company has such a large first-mover advantage that it's next to inconceivable that any competitor will be able to offer a better product in such a way that Google will lose a decent chunk of market share. It, along with Apple, has an extremely high customer satisfaction rating. Even if there are better products, perception is reality -- and the perception is that Google offers the information as fast as it can and connects the searcher with the information they need, and with quality.

At least two U.S. brands top their respective list, while U.S. automakers slide further down the pile of irrelevancy in a changed age of fuel efficiency and the perception of better foreign brand auto quality.

Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) reported stellar, above-expectations quarterly results yesterday after market close. One would have thought that this company, in the midst of U.S. economic uncertainty, would have reported a mediocre quarter at best, but that wasn't the case. Apple outpaced expectations by $0.11 per share, shipped more Mac computers than during any quarter in its history, and saw a 38% revenue jump from the year-ago quarter.

As a nice reward for such a stellar quarter, the market took Apple out behind the woodshed and gave it a sound whipping. The reason? Apple's murky guidance for the fourth quarter. This from a company that almost always shoots low with guidance only to blow the numbers away. Add that to ongoing concern over the health of CEO Steve Jobs and you have a 10% drop in AAPL shares before the market opened this morning.

Is Apple the victim of outsized expectations? You bet. Just like Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) the other day -- which also reported a fantastic quarter but saw its shares pummeled right after results were announced -- Apple may be losing the ability to impress. In reality, both companies are doing excellent business in the face of gas and energy price spikes in addition to a six-month string of job losses in the U.S. Yet, the market slapped huge losses on both stocks based on what could be considered shaky speculation for future growth prospects.

On the other hand, Citigroup, Inc. (NYSE: C) saw stock gains after reporting a better-than-expected $2.5 billion dollar quarterly loss last week. Talk about twisted.

Will Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) be able to stay afloat with its track record of good earnings reports this Thursday when it reports Q2 numbers? The internet search and advertising giant is expected to have a 33% lift over the year-ago quarter. To me, that sounds like an unstoppable freight train like it has for a few years now.

Google's growth means that the addiction many of us have to finding information anywhere at any time is playing right into Google's mantra of having universally-accessible information at our fingertips anywhere, with any device. Think the U.S. economy is affecting ad spending on Google? If analyst predictions are right this Thursday after the bell, you may be proved wrong.

The 25-analyst estimate is for a $4/share profit for Google. Any tech company would love to have that figure. The company, which has partnered with competitor Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and rules many of the markets it competes in (specifically, search and advertising), still has not found an anchor to keep it grounded in terms of making money. Although most still comes from search text advertising, will that growth slow down in the near future? The more that's been speculated in the recent past, the more it hasn't turned out that way.

When Tom talked about Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) failure to properly monetize YouTube, he questioned if Google's purchase of the world's largest video-sharing site was a mistake. In relative terms, Google's use of stock to purchase YouTube was a short-term impact more than anything. But he's right -- YouTube still has not found a secret sauce to monetize the huge amount of video traffic being sent to and viewed from the site every second of the day.

What has taken Google two years to figure out here? YouTube has been a playground for testing different online video monetization methods, but none of them have really worked. YouTube started out as a grassroots video-sharing site, and as its customer base has grown, it's one area where ads continually have been shunned by its viewers. So, Google may be giving up and going to a traditional method of selling advertising on YouTube: the pre-roll and post-roll ad video clip.

This model has been used on news websites and most other types of video sites with success. It's a model that works. Plug in a 10-second or 15-second video in front of (and following) a customer-requested video clip and that advertising model works. Publishers have to keep them short (10 seconds is optimal), of course. So far, Google has shunned this kind of traditional video advertising on YouTube. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, it may be ready to forge ahead with this model. It needs to get a respectable amount of revenue from YouTube somehow, because now, it's not.

After Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) walked away from a $40+ billion dollar deal with Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) this past week, competitor Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) was very, very relieved. After all, a combined Micro-Hoo would have been a significant competitor (in a best-case scenario) to Google. To help dissuade both parties to make a deal, Google ran a two-week test on Yahoo! to supply the competitor with its own advertising system. The test went well.

Now that Yahoo! has proved that is could one day dump its search technology and outsource that piece of its business to Google, Google executives are looking for that exact scenario. They believe it will help prevent another attempt by Microsoft to purchase Yahoo! in the future. They are probably right -- if Google were to become one of Yahoo!'s largest partners, there would be issues with Microsoft buying Yahoo! now or in the future, from a regulatory perspective.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that "We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them ... we share a lot of values with them" in his remarks at yesterday's annual Google shareholder's meeting at Google's Mountain View, Ca. headquarters. Brian added that a potential deal with Yahoo! was "not about scuttling (the deal)." Hogwash -- I say that was exactly why the Google-Yahoo! test was performed. Look for a Yahoo!-Google search advertising partnership in the very near future, folks.

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been growing its employee count by leaps and bounds over the last few years, but has recently slowed that growth which, of course, sounded an investor alert. But, the world's largest internet search engine just can't keep track of the activities of all its new employees, according to CEO Eric Schmidt.

Google does not want new employees to get lost in the cracks, according to Schmidt. If this is true, then Google is growing too fast for its britches. "We have slowed our head count growth for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is it began to feel like we really didn't have a good sense of what people were doing ... the systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people," Schmidt told CNBC.

In the first quarter of 2008, Google upped its head count from 16,805 to 19,156. That's quite a bit in a single quarter. Even with all those new people, Google affords more luxuries on its employees than most other public companies in the world. Even with a recession in progress (if you agree with that), Google's business, so far, has been stellar. Schmidt indicated that "we have gross margins to afford it," in talking about the lavish treatment of Google employees and the benefits they receive. Will shareholders continue to like the way that money is being spent? So far, there have not been any complaints.

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is rolling out another serious swipe at advertising in a relatively new category: mobile phone screens. Although mobile advertising is nothing new, Google's intense focus on this new platform for display ads is ramping up excitement in some circles. After all, there are many more cellphones with mobile web capability than there are PCs worldwide. The trick is to get consumers and businesses using the mobile web. The iPhone has helped kickstart interest in this that had been pretty much dormant before last year for a range of reasons.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin even said at Google's recent quarterly results conference call that "The mobile ads work very well ... there's nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search." If that holds true -- and we all know how desktop search has panned out -- mobile search may be a huge blockbuster.

Faster data connections are available with many wireless carriers now, smartphone shipments are increasing, and attention to the mobile web has gained a huge amount of steam due to the iPhone and its full web browsing capabilities. Once Google's Android operating system begins shipping and the mobile web is a single button press away, Google's next frontier to attack will be the mobile search market. And, of course, selling display ads along with all those searches.