The whole world loves Google, with its cute brand and free and useful services. Advertisers (generally) love the returns, shareholders and analysts love its performance on Wall Street (+53 percent in
the last year) and the media loves all of these things, which is why we have hundreds of stories about the search giant everyday. But what nobody knows, and everyone seems to forget that they don't
know, is how exactly the world's most popular company works. To investors and analysts, Google only discloses the basics: profit, expenses and balance sheet. "Google's whole purpose is to make
information easier to access--unless, of course, you want to know information about Google," says one analyst. Perhaps that's why Wall Street has been so very wrong about Google's earnings the last
two quarters: analysts drastically overestimated its Q4 '05 results and severely underestimated its Q1 '06 numbers. Google execs tell the
Los Angeles Times the company may be turning over a new
leaf by moving towards greater transparency, but there's internal squabbling about how to do that. Remember, transparency also means giving competitors a look at the secret sauce, the most important
thing in the closely guarded world of search. To be sure, advertisers and publishers that depend on the Web giant for traffic would love to know more about the mysterious company, whose internal motto
seems to be "the less information, the better."
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