BBC Online is reporting that

Shares of internet search company Google fell 7% on Wednesday after its earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations for the first time.
The firm said late on Tuesday that fourth-quarter profit rose by 82% to $372.2m (£209m), or $1.22 per share. Analysts had expected $1.50 a share.

Google’s stock fell $30.88 to $401.78 in New York amid concerns that the tech-industry giant may be overvalued.

Well, well. The ingratitude of Wall Street. And after Google’s capitulation to the Chinese regime, too. There’s no pleasing some capitalists.

This morning’s Observer column.

In the longer term … the commercial logic that led Google to capitulate may turn out to be counterproductive. The reason is that – in contrast to companies like, say, Halliburton – Google’s ultimate fate depends on trust. Its corporate mission – to ‘organise the world’s information’ – means that it aspires to become the custodian of immense quantities of private data. Already, it holds the email archives of millions of subscribers to Google Mail, plus records of every web search they ever made. And although it is resisting the attempt of the US government to mount a fishing expedition through those data, nobody doubts that, in the end, Google will comply with the law.

But that’s different from making a strategic decision to compete in a space dominated by an evil political regime. Google could, after all, have said that if the Chinese authorities demanded self-censorship then it would not play. One only has to put it like that to imagine the incredulity of mainstream media reaction to such a proposition. Imagine standing up at a CBI conference and declaring that one is not going to do business in China until it makes serious moves towards becoming an open society! By joining the Gadarene rush into the Chinese market, Google may have gained short-term advantage. But it has also forfeited its right to our trust.

More: Just seen this post on Brad DeLong’s Blog. It compares the results from an image search for “tienanmen” on (1) Google.cn and (2) Google.com.

Yet more: Bill Thompson (who is less censorious of Google) sent me a link to this Geekculture cartoon!

Difficult to know which is more nauseating — Google’s launch of a new, self-censored search engine in China, or its top executives’ tortuous attempts to rationalise it. It just goes to show that while you can sometimes trust people, you can’t ever trust corporations.

Thoughtful piece by John Lanchester in the current edition of the London Review of Books.

Interesting NYT snippet on Google AdSense…

The trickle-down effect from Google does not stop at fledgling entrepreneurs. A growing number of rank-and-file contributors to Web sites are also profiting.

Consider Digital Point Solutions, a software company in San Diego, which publishes an online forum (http://forums.digitalpoint.com) frequented by about 15,000 users. Any one of them who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. (The discussion’s creator then splits his share with others who post messages.)

Google does not actually advertise on the Digital Point site. Rather, through Google’s AdSense program, it places ads on the forum, similar to the ads that appear next to search results on Google.com. Google scans the information on the forum’s pages, then posts related ads. If the discussion is about computer hardware, for instance, ads for DVD drives might appear.

Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Hmmm… My total income to date from AdSense is, let me see… (counts pennies), er, $15.06!

Has been released for Mac OS X 10.4 and it’s wonderful. But here’s an interesting quirk — a World War II bomber photographed flying over Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, UK!

Ably blogged by Paul Boutin. Am I the only person on the planet who is underwhelmed? And who started that crazy rumour about a “Google PC”?