Economic Woes May Move Google To Sit On Its Money
By Jason Lee Miller

It's hard to imagine the death of search as we know it, but search is changing as we speak, and unless Google finds some flexibility, the company will be at the forefront of innovation no longer. The dent in Google's armor comes from rather surprising directions, not from Microsoft or Yahoo-both with their own rigid corporate paralysis-but from Twitter and Facebook, where users create their very own walled gardens.

From the outset it's important to say that Google isn't going anywhere. Who else can scan a trillion URLs with the kind of efficiency Google can? Nobody has technology that can equal, and as things evolve challenging that technological supremacy is proving to be Microsoft's biggest misguidance. Competitors should have been evolving new spaces instead of crawling into what became exclusively Google's.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted both that Google is not immune to the economy and that he's currently more interested in letting the cash pile up than he is in acquiring the latest darling startup that is Twitter.

Indeed the cash cow is a bit dry at the moment. Rimm-Kaufman's latest numbers show the down economy is coming home to roost in search, with sales from search ads down 20 percent, with lower CPC bids, with consumers searching for products less. SEMPO has adjusted down its search marketing spending forecasts for the next three years.

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