Earnings: GOOG CEO: “We are very much in the search business”

For a second during Google’s 3Q earnings call I had an image of Chairman and CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt swinging a gold watch in front of my eyes while he intoned: “We’re a search company.” In fact, he closed the opening remarks with the comment that “we are very much in the search business.” But then he went on to talk about the ways that Google is also in the portal biz, swapping that “p” word for another — personalization. Google started as a company that sent users way; it’s future is staked in no small part on keeping people tethered by services like Gmail and Google Apps. In fact, one of Google’s goals is to keep increasing the percentage of revenue that comes from traffic to its own sites and through its own services.
Personalization: “The interesting thing is that this approach to having your information personalized is a benefit not only for the user who can continue to refine and target information, which is what we are working on, to people in a very personalized way; but also for businesses who want to know they are spending their money in an effective and targeted way.”
Partnerships: But Google also stresses its need for partners — Google-AOL, Google-MySpace, etc. Schmidt: “We see impressive growth in the area of partnering with existing and new companies from content technology and advertising perspectives; we’ve laid the groundwork for many more coming.” Speaking of partnerships, Schmidt declined to answr outright a question about whether several major music companies had taken a stake in Google or YouTube. Schmidt: “With respect to the content deals and the ones we did most recently, speaking for Google, we were able to do some very interesting deals using a combination of financial prepayments, revenue shares, other ways in which the money flows. We saw that in our partnerships the best partnerships come when both partners have a share in the revenue success of the deal and that is typically the deal structure we have been doing. I’d rather not go into the specifics of those deals.”
Panoply: Or plethora, if you prefer … either could work for the constantly growing array of products Google offers. Co-founder Sergey Brin spent part of the call explaining his efforts to streamline the way products are offered, to integrate more of them as features instead of standalones: “What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them. And then you will have to search before you can do a search, in many cases.” One effort in the works will standardize the way documents, photos and videos are shared. Simple, more consistent are becoming watchwords.
Video Ads: Omid Kordestani, SVP-global salesand business development, said the company is seeing “great success” with its video ads. Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP-prodict management, said video ads have been implemented by hundreds of advertisers in over 30 countries.
YouTube: Kordestani: “We think ultimately the answer lies with the fact that there is a lot of usage here, a lot of interest from our users, and that we believe that there is also a great monetization engine that Google can provide here to make this all work for all the parties.”
Copyright: Asked “how heavily are you relying on maybe a liberal interpretation of the DMCA,” Schmidt replied: “We are definitely not relying on a liberal or a conservative interpretation of the DMCA. We are relying on the DMCA as it is being imposed by law and there are not a lot of shades of gray in how it works.”
Hard to believe but this is only a small amount. Google gluttons can find more in the transcript from SeekingAlpha.com.