• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2010

Google opened the Google Phone Gallery late Wednesday night showcasing Android-powered devices, Android Product Manager Ben Serridge announced in a blog post. The site features phones offering Android Market, Google Search, and Google Mobile services such as Gmail, Maps, and YouTube. This week Google CEO Eric Schmidt continued the mantra that mobile searches will overtake those online.

But back up six years and you might find a different story. Google Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stand in front of a TED audience offering a peek inside the technology company. They shared tidbits about international search patterns, philanthropic efforts of Google Foundation, and their dedication to innovation.

At the time the world seemed to obsess with the Hanes commercial -- boxers or briefs -- prompting Brin to jokingly say "And before I get started today, I just wanted to get it out of the way, the answer is boxers," before launching into a company overview.

That company overview begins with a visual representation of people worldwide logging on to Google. The beams of light emanating from the turning globe labeled by color tells the story. Brin explains to the audience it proves difficult to maintain the latency for the queries, about thousands per second at the time.

The duo talk about Google Grants, The Google Foundation, and Orkut's vision to create a social network, which we all know didn't go as planned. Page also explains the 20% rule for Google engineers manifested from both he and Brin's experience at Montessori school, which supports the educational philosophy for children based on Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori. Engineers can spend 20% of their time working on personal projects. Google News, started by a researcher, spawned from a 20% project. This is how Google keeps innovation running.

In the TED video (at the bottom of this post), Brin explains AdSense (Google introduced tips on Smart Pricing Thursday) and talks about how the ultimate search engine will gain smarts through artificial intelligence. He provides this example: In the early days, a young blogger wrote about his depression in a post. Google's algorithms interpreted the blogger's boredom with being a boring person and served up related searches such as "retard." Although Google no longer uses this algorithm, since then there has been countless amounts of innovations such as Google Instant.

Google.org philanthropic projects range from tracking flu trends to monitoring energy consumption in the home. A blog post late last month offers a widget that can help consumers save power and money. Today, Google only offers the service throughlocal utility companies in the United Kingdom; San Diego, Calif.; and Germany.

And this year as the flu season approaches, Google will once again partner with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services providing people with information about where they can get a flu shot through a dedicated Web site, and identify the regions hit hardest by the viruses.

And after all these innovations analysts at firms like Ford Equity Research still project that Google will underperform the market during the next six to 12 months. The firm bases the projection on analysis of three key factors that influence common stock performance: earnings strength, relative valuation, and recent price movement.

Google produced a neutral trend in earnings per share during the past five quarters and posted earnings that fell short of analysts' expectations, according to the report from Ford Equity. Share price changes during the past year indicates that Google will perform poorly in the near term, according to the firm.

By the way, Google, happy 12th birthday. And, we need an updated TED post.