In an interview, the new CEO of Google has said that the company
behind the leading search engine on the internet is profitable. Dr
Eric Schmidt was this week named as Google’s new CEO, having
previously acted as CEO for Novell. Schmidt replaces 28-year old
co-founder Larry Page who will become President for Products.
Without revealing figures, Schmidt said in an interview this
week that the privately owned company achieved a net profit in its
last quarter and has turned an operating profit for each of its
past two quarters, making it one of the few profitable high-profile
dot.coms. Google is now expanding its operations, with plans for
new offices in London, Germany and Japan.
Unlike other search engines Google refuses to allow search
results to be distorted by companies paying to appear high up in
listings, nor does it clutter its home page with banner ads.
Similarly it clearly identifies advertisements in search results by
labelling them “sponsored links” so that users will not be confused
by the relevancy of search results.
Additional revenue comes from search services licensed to other
sites. It now acts as the search engine for the Yahoo! portal and
provides search services for corporate intranets, with corporate
customers paying per search. Among its clients is Cisco, which has
an intranet comprising 53 million pages.
Google is widely regarded as the internet’s best search engine
and leads the competition with its index of almost 1.4 billion web
pages. It remains privately owned, so is under no obligation to
publicly announce its profits. Market analysts estimate that
turnover this year will be about $50 million.
