• Silicon Alley Insider, Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:45 AM

The latest comScore figures don't solve Google's case of the missing clicks, but they may ease fears that the search giant tanked the first quarter. According to comScore March data, Google's query growth in the U.S. accelerated grew 4% over February.

Now, query growth isn't the same as paid click growth-which is used as an indicator of how well Google is performing-but the two are related. After showing a scary 11% decline (from 37% to 26%) in U.S. query growth from January to February, investors should be somewhat reassured that growth deceleration stabilized at about 30% for the quarter. A nosedive in query growth, compounded by fewer overall clicks on sponsored listings, would certainly have amounted to a terrible first quarter for Google.

So, how does query growth relate to revenue growth? In the third quarter, Google's U.S. queries rose 50%while U.S. revenue jumped 46%. In the following quarter, queries grew 40% and U.S. revenue grew 40%. This means first quarter revenue growth in the U.S. should be about 25-30%.

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