Silicon Alley Insider - Nicholas Carlson | October 21, 2008 10:15 AM

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Sorry, Googlers: Fun’s over. Google will slow its hiring and make fewer acquisitions as a worsening economy puts its customers’ advertising budgets “under stress,” CEO Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg today.

On the earnings call last week, Schmidt said the company needed to be “realistic” about the economy.  The hiring and deals details, however, are new.

“All of us are vulnerable,” said Schmidt. “It’s a race between a contraction in advertising, which would affect everybody, and a very positive shift from offline to online.”

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InformationWeek - Posted by Thomas Claburn, Jul 25, 2008 05:23 PM

Three years after Google declared that its index was three times larger than any other search engine and then declined to cite a specific number to support that claim, it was widely believed that Google had tired of index one-upmanship and that it would no longer be measuring its index.

Well, Google has its yardstick in hand once again.

Two Google engineers on Friday said that Google’s index of the Web now contains 1 trillion unique URLs.

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BUSINESSWEEK - News Analysis September 4, 2007, 12:01AM EST

The tech giant’s startup investments are narrowing opportunities for VCs. Other corporations are upping their venture investing, too

by Aaron Ricadela

Just as it has done to companies in the software, publishing, and advertising industries, Google is becoming a thorn in the side of venture capitalists. The owner of the world’s largest Web search engine is scooping up young tech outfits for a relative pittance, giving itself first dibs on hot-growth technologies and in some cases boxing VC funds out of potential big-bang acquisitions and initial public offerings.

Google (GOOG) has begun making VC-style investments to the tune of about $500,000 or less in promising startups, often buying those companies afterward, according to partners at Silicon Valley VC firms who spoke on condition of anonymity. In an effort to keep spotting promising deals, Google has been hiring a stable of finance pros. And it has invested more than $1 million in a Mumbai-based investment firm called Seedfund to gain access to technology such as automatic translation software that could help spur growth in India.

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Sillicon Alley Insider - Henry Blodget | July 19, 2008 9:04 AM

Remember all those $900-$1000 Google (GOOG) price targets analysts were throwing around last year, when Google blasted through $700? Well, those were just typical Wall Street price targets: “Stock going up? Add 20%-30% to current price, fiddle with Excel model to develop required assumptions, publish.” (See “Mary Meeker’s YouTube Math“)

Those kinds of price targets work well as long as nothing changes–as long as the company keeps beating expectations, the market stays strong, the economy keeps rolling, the industry doesn’t change, management doesn’t screw up, etc. If something does change, however… oops.

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CNNMoney - Last Updated: July 17, 2008: 6:21 PM EDT

Google shares fall about 7% in after-market trading. Income increases 35%, but earnings disappoint Wall Street.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (AP) — Google Inc.’s earnings growth bogged down more than investors anticipated during the second quarter, raising worries that the ailing U.S. economy is starting to touch the Internet search leader.

Although Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) management maintains the company will thrive even if the economy deteriorates further, the results released Thursday caused Google shares to plunge by about 8 percent.

The company said it earned $1.25 billion, or $3.92 per share, during the three months ended in June. That represented a 35 percent increase from net income of $925 million, or $2.93 per share, at the same time last year.

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Sillicon Alley Insider - Michael Learmonth | July 18, 2008 11:10 AM

Google bought Russian contextual ad firm Begun from Web portal Rambler Media for $140 million. Google (GOOG) gets a Russian sales force in the deal and access to Begun’s 40,000 advertisers and 143,000 partner sites.

Rambler.ru, Russia’s 4rth-biggest portal, will outsource it own search and contextual advertising to Google. Rambler owned a little over 50% of Begun, and bought out the rest of the company from Bannatyne Limited before selling the whole thing to Google.

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FORTUNE - July 18, 2008: 4:28 PM EDT

Hit by the widening advertising slowdown, Google’s weaker numbers show the search sector is on a steeper slide.

By Scott Moritz, writer

NEW YORK (Fortune) — In the clearest sign yet that online ad sales growth cannot outrun a global economic slowdown, Google reported the first-ever sequential quarterly revenue decline in its U.K. business. The dip, as reported in the company’s second-quarter earnings Thursday, cut into Google’s overall international growth, bringing it down to 52% from 55% in the first quarter.

That’s unsettling news for Google and the search sector, since overseas growth has previously been the crucial area that has helped Google strongly offset the ongoing U.S. slump.

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