Google's Earnings Cause Trouble For comScore

Overjoyed investors have made Google's stock go up by about 20 percent since the company reported its earnings.  comScore, on the other hand, temporarily lost eight or so percent of its value.

The research company had predicted that Google would achieve a pathetic two percent year-over-year increase in search click volume.  Google came back with 20, and that's when onlookers got a little bit upset.

There is, after all, a pretty big gap between two and 20; if these were dollars, and not clicks, a two percent rise would be lucky to keep up with inflation, while 20 would represent a reasonable two-year gain.

comScore might not have screwed up as much as it appears, though.  Henry Blodget writes, "The majority of Google's click growth in the quarter likely came in the international business.  Paid clicks in the US business likely grew only in the high single digits (less than half of the 20% reported growth).  So, after accounting for the international contribution, Comscore's US reports were likely actually relatively close to being accurate."

Also, "Comscore alerted analysts to a surprising deceleration in the US, one that was borne out in the Q1 results.  If analysts had dismissed the Comscore data out of hand and refused to cut their estimates, they'd be nursing some major wounds this morning."

Blodget's lines of thought may be winning converts; at the moment, comScore's down only 0.81 percent for the day.

Small number of sites in initial rollout

Googlebot received an update that permits it to complete certain forms, and learn more about the site hosting them.

Websites place content behind forms for the purpose of collecting information from a visitor requesting access to it. The site publisher might want those details for demographic details to improve marketing campaigns, for example.

Google thinks it can present better results to searchers by having access to the URLs behind forms, improving the site's exposure in the process. The Google Webmaster Central blog promised their crawls will be well-behaved:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. That means that if a search form is forbidden in robots.txt, we won't crawl any of the URLs that a form would generate. Similarly, we only retrieve GET forms and avoid forms that require any kind of user information.

However, concerns have been raised about Google crawling forms not marked as forbidden. Kevin Heisler complained at Search Engine Watch  the practice could violate the privacy of corporate data.

Though confident in Google's intentions, Heisler thinks potential backlash from corporate interests could be a problem. "The costs to CEOs, CIOs and CTOs at corporations far outweigh the benefits to consumers," he said.

Gokul Rajaram, a high-ranking Google product manager who helped launch one of the search giant’s most profitable ventures has left to start his own company.

“I’ve been having the itch to do something entrepreneurial for awhile now,” says Rajaram, 33, known by Googlers as one of the “godfathers of AdSense.” “I’m in my early 30s and I have some experience and financial security, so the time felt right.”

“I have some ideas on the consumer Internet side,” he adds. “I’m still trying to flesh that out in the next few weeks. Right now, I’m just trying to get used to not going to work.”

Rajaram, who left Google on Nov. 2., says he’s also interested in pursuing journalism or writing.

Whatever venture he pursues, he has the blessings of top Google (GOOG) brass Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin. Product management vice president Susan Wojcicki honored him with a large plaque signed by a few hundred Googlers at his farewell party at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., two weeks ago.

After search giant adjusts how they are tracked, analysts say growth stalls

SAN FRANCISCO - New data confirming slowing growth in Google Inc.'s paid clicks renewed debate Thursday on Wall Street over whether the Internet search company's revenue can quickly adjust to changes it made in how it generates clicks.

Citing data that comScore Inc. released after the market closed on Wednesday, analysts said growth in Google's click-through rate has nearly ground to a halt.

Google's stock dropped $16.09, more than 3.5 percent, to $442.10 in afternoon trading.

The click-through rate grew 3 percent in February compared to a year earlier, and January saw no increase compared to January 2007. Several months earlier, the rate was growing 25 percent to 40 percent compared to a year earlier. The new data is in line with click-through declines Google reported last quarter.