• PaidContent.org, Friday, May 23, 2008 12:03 PM

Can Google maintain its heady growth? The question weighs heavily on the company's stock price, which fell Wednesday following the announcement of Microsoft's Live Search cash back plan. Speaking at the annual Goldman Sachs Internet Conference, Nick Fox, Google's director of business product management defended the company's search growth, stressing "significant opportunities across the board."

He pointed to four search revenue drivers: query volume, ads per query, quality, price per lead, and the fact that many queries still don't carry ads. "A small portion of our queries have ads... we see that as a pretty significant opportunity," Fox said, adding that the challenge is to convince advertisers they'd make more money by bidding on more keywords. Another opportunity lies in improving the quality of their landing pages, he said.

Fox also addressed other areas, including social networking, which he said has surprised everyone in terms of how difficult it's been to monetize. "We found it more challenging than we expected it would be. On search you have this amazing thing: the query... on a social network, you don't really know (what the user is looking for)," Fox said, adding that the real opportunity is the mobile phone, which is "much more similar to search than a social network is ... mobile actually monetizes quite well."

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