• Silicon Alley Insider, Thursday, March 5, 2009 11:30 AM

It's a question that anyone who watches this business wants to know: what's going to happen to Google once its search revenues plateau? During a chat with Internet Analyst Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley's technology conference on Tuesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company's next growth driver would basically be its current business working better. Haven't he and other Googlers said that before? What comes after search?

In the conversation with Meeker, Schmidt alluded to "a set of display businesses and an exchange" that are being built from DoubleClick, the display advertising provider Google bought for $3.1 billion in 2007. He said the display ad business is "not uniform in any particular way" and that the way these ads are managed "is done in many cases by hand or by poor quality spreadsheets." True, but Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer points out that it will take a ton of work to make this business "more Googly."

Nevertheless, this is Google's plan. "We see an opportunity to apply the Google magic and the measurement and the scaling in that business, and that's probably the next big one," Schmidt said, adding that there are three main problems with display management and delivery today: Choosing which ad to show, standardizing display formats, and forging relationships with all of the big advertisers.

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