Google Mobile Search Small But Growing; Google Phone Not Necessary, But Possibly An Opportunity
By James Quintana Pearce - Thu 18 Oct 2007 08:29 PM PST
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has released its Q3 earnings—the financial details are up on PaidContent. The earnings call included a fair bit about mobile (transcript), particularly as in response to curious analysts. President and co-founder Larry Page said that mobile search traffic increased both domestically and internationally (which isn’t a surprise, the main question would be by how much) and the traffic to Google’s mobile applications is “growing well”. Also, “mobile ads are really doing well, especially in Japan where we had strong revenue growth and we also launched mobile ads in Korea,”
In response to a question, chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said that “our mobile searches are increasing rapidly compared to a year ago. They are growing more quickly than non-mobile searches. They are still a very small percentage of total searches, which is of great frustration to us and we are working very, very hard with some mobile operators to get Google Search to be as standard as possible on every phone—very quick and very responsive.”
Page managed to also deftly sidestep a question on whether Google would need to release a phone, mobile operating system or wireless access infrastructure to succeed in mobile. His response: They don’t need to, but they might anyway… “I don’t think again that there’s a requirement to do any things like that...we would also love to get even greater numbers of people and wider access to our applications that we provide...So I think that it is more of an opportunity for us then a cost. We have tremendous usage of our current mobile applications and we have deals with very, very many different wireless carriers and so on, and many other types of carriers. I think those things will all continue.”
