I wasn’t on the Google Factory Tour in person but spent some quality time with the team via a good webcast. (Marissa, thanks for reminding people to use the mike so we could hear.) I’ve still got some recorded sessions to catch up on but I did hear the 50-minute q-and-a with co-founder Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and others that wrapped up the day. The range of the questions — from whether Google would offer IM to whether the company was giving enough back to the world to plans for paid content — was fascinating. The answers weren’t always satisfying; at one point, Schmidt said he didn’t want to talk about things that fit in better with last week’s shareholder meeting. (That would be the cue for every reporter who doesn’t have a share to buy at least one or get someone’s proxy for the next shareholder’s meeting.)
Some highlights:– Asked whether Google was preparing to venture into premium content like a low-cost monthly music subscription service or the like, Schmidt replied, “We have debated these questions internally and we’re very happy with the company’s current diversification within the advertising market. We have diversification within country, we have diversification within local versus regional versus national. And we have diversification across categories. So as long as the internet is growing and as long as people are seeing real value in Google, we believe that the advertising business that we’re in will remain a very good business to be in. Obviously, over time, we would like to add additional diversification but the space we’re in now is growing so quickly and is so large relevant to our current size, there’s so many things … so many solutions we can come up with in this pay-for-performance category.”
– Asked to put the new home page in the context of competition with Yahoo, Schmidt replied: “We don’t actually approach the question the way you framed it. … The dynamic isn’t about dealing with any of the existing offerings … but rather trying to do something new and we’ve tried to highlight why it’s new. We don’t do something that’s just the same; after all, the things athat are the same are already doing a fine job.”
– On the new home page as a targeted advertising opporunity: Mayer said the page doesn’t have any now but “we may explore that in the future.”
How does Google balance opening more technology to create more content with the need to weed out spam or sites like link farms? Brin: “The temptation to get traffic is always going to be there. I also want to point that there’s nothing wrong with creating pages purely for ads … catalogues are all ads. But there are certainly some that are misleading or try to get into the search results in misleading ways and this is one of the great challenges of web search.”
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