No such word as recession for Google

Google Beats Recession

As many businesses struggle to gauge whether the recession is over for them or not after months of revenue hardship and emergency cost-cutting, Google are instead struggling to remember if the global financial crisis even happened at all.

The California-based tech giant are ready and poised to take full advantage of the recovering economy, in particular the internet advertising market, as it reported net profit of $1.64 billion between July and September, up 27 percent on the same period a year ago. This prompted CEO Eric Schmidt to announce: "The worst of the recession is clearly behind us."

Google, considered a barometer for internet commerce because its search engine is the hub of the web's largest advertising network, said that the number of paid clicks, including clicks on advertisements on Google and partner sites, rose 4 percent from the previous quarter and 14 percent from the same period last year.

Google has now begun stepping up hiring and capital spending, as well as considering more small and large acquisitions. "We now have the business confidence to invest in the next phase of innovation," said Schmidt.

Google investors are obviously liking what they see, as shares rose 3 percent in extended trading.

This news will only serve to further deflate the mood in the Microsoft-Yahoo camp, who are trying in vane to contend with google at the summit of internet search and advertising markets. First, they merged their search technology units. Then both individually launched ambitious marketing campaigns to promote their own search facilities, with Yahoo spending $100 million on re-branding themselves as the future of internet search. Microsoft's Bing showed promising signs early on, becoming the fastest growing search engine, before this promise faded as Google came back stronger once again.

"Google has no competition. Yahoo is withering on the vine and [Microsoft's] Bing is too tiny now," said Coin Gillis, senior analyst at Brigantine Advisors.

He also said the message from Google management was loud and clear: "Big brand advertisers are back and they are spending money."

Analysts have been saying for months that as the economy improves, search advertising is likely to rebound most quickly among all forms of advertising because marketers can increase spending on it literally overnight. "We saw a significant uptick in search spending [in contrast to display ads] this quarter," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of digital ad agency 360i.

"Marketers really saw the bottom at the end of the second quarter," he added.

Now, no one is suggesting Yahoo and Microsoft should give up in their fight to topple Google, but the task is showing no signs of getting easier - if anything, its looking more impossible with the end of every quarter.

Google have all the chips, they can bully the rest of the competition out of almost every channel. It is such an institution, so powerful, that I wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades we were choosing between Republicans, Democrats...and Google.

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