Good observation here:
Google is worth $30 per share

Funny that, as shares are up more than $30 apiece in after hours trading. Google delivered another blowout quarter. Last earnings call they soften expectations for this quarter, and with the bar set low they easily topped it.

• Google noticed 14% profit growth in sequential quarters

• 96% year over year profit growth (although last year's results included a $201 million charge to account for a legal settlement with Yahoo over the Overture pattent).
• Google saw 20% quarterly increase in profit from Google.com
• 7% growth rate throughout their partner network
• international 39% same last and this
• UK 15% this quarter 14% last
• 4989 employees as of September 30th

Gary has more:

"Although this is typically a slower season for internet properties, we had another exceptional quarter," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

"Our focus on end users and on quality of information and advertising worldwide continues to work extremely well. We are very pleased with how well this is working at scale."

Shares eclipsed their all time highs, & were trading at 335.06 when I last checked, with Google up over 10% in after hours trading.

Not that I had many shares, but I sold a few at $326 thinking Google would soften forward guidance, but they never did! I still suspect the stock will come down a bit after the market opens in the morning ;)

Taiwan recently whined to Google about their maps calling Taiwan a providence of China, and recently Google maps changed. Apparently removing the providence of China bit pissed off China:

Shortly after Taiwan's foreign ministry formally complained, the China reference abruptly disappeared from Google's Taiwan map last week. That change has provoked cries of dismay in China and talk of a possible boycott of Google's service in that country, according to Chinese media.

Google has quickly backpeddled about the reasons behind the change, saying they were just trying to clean up the map image.

The change doesn't reflect Google's political opinion on the dispute, according to company spokeswoman Debbie Frost. She said Google wanted to enlarge its map images to make them even easier for users to see, so it removed all text from the left corner of the Web page.

Since when do you rename countries and providences to clean up the map?

DMOZ meta editor Hutcheson likely a fake posts about the fading of DMOZ:

The biggest decline in the quality of the web in recent years can be traced to the devaluation of ODP, and with it, the esteem of the hard-working editors who created the directory. We’re no longer the kings and queens of the web the way we once were. It is depressing, because while it lasted, being an editor at DMOZ was the mountain-topping experience of my life.

Many of use live on disability settlements and workmans comp. DMOZ is a job we can do from home; we feel important and that we are contributing to society; and the volunteer status means any income from the project is off the books and won’t threaten our disability pay.

I truly believed we were the gatekeepers of the internet: those entrusted to identify which sites were worthy. The inescapable truth is that we are no longer as important as we once were, and it is a blow to my self-identity.

I think I was duped ;) hutcheson said it wasn't him.

Not a conventional link building technique, but sometimes when you know an idea is going to go viral you can jump in on it early and then quickly claim how successful it was for you, or why you think it is an important cause.

Even if, in truth, something did not work amazingly well, you can still do well off the secondary plublicity. The million dollar home page concept is starting to fizzle a bit, but imagine if you were one of the early ad buyers and quickly turned in a glowing testimonial.

The first posted testimonial works as bait to sell more ads. If you take a look at the usage log on the site that posted the first testimonial you will see that their case study link sent them over 6 times as much traffic this month as the million dollar home page link did.

If an idea goes viral there will be some copy cats that copy the link structure & content. Also some reporters may want easy background on a story. The $100 ad spend being one of the first ad buyers also listed as one of the first testimonials may pay off huge.

Sometimes bets like that waste your money, but in aggregate they usually pay off.

The most recent blog meme is Google's Blogger is a mass spam system.

David Sifry says he thinks that between 2 & 8% of blogs are spam, but I think just like people his systems are not good at detecting much of the spam.

Google maintains that they care:

When spam goes up, it directly affects the quality of those results. I'm exceedingly sympathetic with these folks because, well, we run one of those services ourselves.

But do they really care?

Think of blog search as a form of vertical search. If blog search is less useful and filtering through the spam

• kills profit margins

• slows blog search innovation

then more people will opt to use general search.

While Jeff Jarvis thinks Google should share it's tricks for not indexing blog spam I don't see why they would want to. Since Google has not put much effort into making their blog search anywhere near as good as their regular search I don't think they mind if nearly all blog search engines are full of spam.

Blog search full of spam = user may as well use general search = $ for Google. And, on another front, that helps Google ensure blog search sucks really bad until they create the solution, and then they get credit for doing right what their competitors could not :)

Just as a curiosity question, how hard would it be to attenuate trust, only trusting new blogs if they were co-cited by multiple trusted sites? There has to be an algorithmic way to do it. If you were worried about new sites being locked out then you could offer multiple search options:

• the filtered trusted version

• the unfiltered version
• perhaps people could even enter their own trusted friends, levels of trust, minimum trusted citations, or make trust a slidable scale & use AJAX to reorder the results as the trust score is adjusted

On top of owning general search Google also wants to be the first port of call for vertical search. Just look at their recent desires on the real estate front.

Through monetizing spam production with AdSense and making publishing free and easy Google pollutes competing information systems for personal profit.

The same thing that is going on in vertical search scene is also going on in general search. Google has an algorithmic probationary period for most new sites. The same sites tend to rank MSN Search & Yahoo! Search quicker and easier.

By paying search spammers via AdSense Google is funding the information pollution that undermines the usefulness of competing search products. As I have stated in the past, Google generally does not give a shit if AdSense is on spam sites or sites that make money stealing other's copyrighted work.

Now what happens if Google ends up indexing AdSense spam sites? Well suddenly it is a real issue then, and they pull out the we care card. Matt Cutts recommends you report it to Google, but the hidden message there is that Google cares only when the spam ranks in Google.

Meanwhile all the A list bloggers are asking Google to fix the problem when they fail to realize the profits this problem brings Google.

Maybe a large part of being the company that organizes the world's information is encouraging entrepreneurs to stuff garbage in rich competitors databases.