Google's Earnings Results -- A Yahoo Engineer's Perspective

Google (GOOG) just reported its Q2-2006 earnings, and the company's sequential revenue growth is just 9%. (The Wall Street whisper number was 10%.) This confirms that the search slowdown is industry wide. Note that almost half of that gain in revenue for Google is not natural growth, it's one-time growth coming from more ads placed on top of the natural web results (specifically the state where they have 3 ads, e.g. the flowers query).

So for Q3 over Q2 their sequential growth will be even lower than 9%, except if they increase their ads significantly and go to 4 ads above the search results (as Yahoo does), and/or start placing ads at the bottom of the page (not just above and to the right).

However, we now have to wait and see whether Wall Street will get tricked into believing this 9% growth is natural and sustained, the stock price tomorrow will tell us that. Wall Street got tricked before, and then it bit them back for Q4-2005 once the revenue accelerating changes caught up and only the natural growth remained.

Unlike Yahoo, Google does not give forward revenue guidance, but if they did, I bet they would be revising the numbers down a bit just like Yahoo (YHOO) did.

Meanwhile, many of us at Yahoo are sad at how severely Wall Street punished our stock (down 20%), but we are hanging in there. Our executive management team choose to focus on the long term, and not try to rush things on the Panama front given how much of our long term value is tied to the new platform, they want the Panama launch to be perfect. I am proud to work at a company with that style of leadership, and I back them up 100%.

[Editor's note: We'll publish the full Google conference call transcript soon after the call -- sign up here to receive it automatically by email.]