Will Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Surpass Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)?

Google reported a strong quarter last week which sent the stock soaring over the $600 level. Google now trades with a market capitalization of approximately $195.22 billion. The growth story seems to be intact for the company as it beat estimates, and even cited 50% annualized growth for YouTube.

But can the Internet giant pass Microsoft as the third largest company in the united states? It's getting quite close. Microsoft's market capitalization resides at $219.61 billion. For Google's market cap to surpass this, the stock price would need to go to $689.06 per share, which does not seem out of reach considering Google trades at $612.53 currently. Microsoft's share price of $25.38 would need to stay the same or go lower in this case, for Google to claim the title.

Google Beats The Numbers (NASDAQ:GOOG)

TAIWAN - Earnings came in at $6.72 per share easily decimating the analyst forecast of $6.67 per share. Google's average cost per click, which determines how much Google and its partners receive for their advertising, soared as well. Revenue was also up 26% year over year. "Google had an excellent quarter. Our core business grew very well, and our newer businesses - particularly display and mobile - continued to show significant momentum." Said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The company holds $33 billion of cash and equivalents.

"Google is taking market share with Android, and fast" Said co-CEO of The Markets Are Open, Allan Edwards. "I would have liked to buy some after hearing this incredible conference call. I'm ecstatic that cost per click advertising is up."

Google Inc rose to $601.45.

Google Fail

Let me start by saying I really like and respect Google as a company. I use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Voice, and (of course) blogger. I also recently activated my Android phone. Once in a while, the services won't be available for one reason or another, but for the most part, all of these services work pretty well.

However, I've run into two really big frustrations lately. The first was with Google Chrome. I still use Firefox as my main browser. There are some annoyances with it, like when it decides to use all of my CPU for no apparent reason. But it works pretty well for me and I like all the development tools it has. I thought I'd give Chrome a try because I like other Google products and wanted to have the automatic bookmark syncing.

I decided quickly that I couldn't use it. Aside from the fact that there are fewer plugins for it, there was one particular issue that drove me crazy - when you use the address bar, you can't type a partial URL and have it find the full link you're looking for. For example, at work, the main site I develop on is http://marriottschool.byu.edu. I don't want to have to type that in every time I visit a page, so I'll just type 'login' or whatever. Firefox finds the login page from my history and gives it to me as an option in the drop-down menu. Chrome does not. I think it's silly for a search company not to be able to do this. I'm even more bothered by the fact that there has been a trouble ticket open for this issue for over a year. It looks like the issue is finally being resolved, but that is a little ridiculous to me.

Problem #2 came with my Android phone. I thought I'd use the Google Voice application on it and I installed the latest version. I noticed that there were some things weird with it - sometimes it would take hours for it to notice new text messages. Even worse, when I did get texts or voicemail, it would take a very long time to open the application and view the text - sometimes 30 or more seconds. Then when I'd start typing a response, the phone would slow down to a crawl and type maybe a character every other second. Again, I noticed that there were other people who had opened a thread on the issue. And again, no fix after weeks. It's horrible. I had to downgrade to the previous release (which works great).

So I'm starting to question my faith in Google. Do they have any quality checking at all? I've heard they hire some pretty smart people. Maybe they only care about their code and creating new applications and don't care about feedback from their users. Maybe they should leave their applications in Beta forever like they used to.

Google Adds Cents to Beat Estimates (NASDAQ: GOOG)

Google inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) smashed the earnings estimates after reporting its third quarter results after the close of the market. Earnings came in at $6.72 per share easily decimating the analyst forecast of $6.67 per share. This was equivalent to $2.17 billion in net income, which has increase 32% on a year-over-year basis.

Google's average cost per click, which determines how much Google and its partners receive for their advertising, soared as well. The company is "improving the ad formats" said Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management, which is helping to increase the number of clicks. Google AdSense revenue was up to $2.2 billion. Rosenberg also commented that the new Google Instant, which allows users to get search results as they type, did not help revenue so much, but was intended to help the user. "[F]rom a resource standpoint, it's actually pretty expensive," he said.

It is interesting to note that U.S. revenue was up 26% year over year, but international revenue accounted for 52% of the total revenue, coming in at $2.8 billion. Google also cited increasing momentum in small businesses.

"Google had an excellent quarter. Our core business grew very well, and our newer businesses - particularly display and mobile - continued to show significant momentum." Said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The company holds $33 billion of cash and equivalents.

Rosenberg continued to talk about 3 things: Display ads came in at a $2.5 billion annualized run rate, which includes ads from YouTube, DoubleClick, and non-text ads; YouTube is monetizing over 2 billion views per week which is up 50% year-over-year. Google is trying new TrueView ads on YouTube, where viewers can select which commercials they would like to watch and advertisers only paying for the selected ads; and lastly, Mobile views of Google's ads is on an annualized run rate of $1 billion. This means they would add $1 billion annually to Google's revenue streams.

With regards to Android, Eric Schmidt commented that people who use Android phones search twice as much, and the searches are more lucrative. Therefore it is quite profitable for Google, who essentially gives the open source operating system away for free.

"Google is taking market share with Android, and fast" Said co-CEO of The Markets Are Open, Allan Edwards. "I would have liked to buy some after hearing this incredible conference call. I'm ecstatic that cost per click advertising is up."

Google Inc. rose 9.07% or $49.07 in after hours trading, to $590.00.

Can Google Beat The Numbers? (NASDAQ: GOOG)

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) reports it's quarterly earnings Thursday after the closing bell. On average analysts expect the fast-growing tech giant to earn a whopping $6.67 per share. The street high estimate is at $7.10 which would greatly impress investors. Last quarter the company reported $6.45 per share.

Google's share price had taken a hit in recent months when the company announced that it would be pulling out of China. This move would leave Google's China market share in the hands of Baidu. However, since then Google's stock price has crept back up from its $433 low in July.

The company has launched several additional features on its web site, appealing to users. For instance the Google instant search makes searching happen in the blink of an eye. The firm also launched "goo.gl" for URL shortening, and has bought a small company called BlindType. The purchase of the company could add new features to Google's rapid selling Android operating system which has been taking market share away from the competitors. Although Google currently lacks a profit model for its top selling operating system, the phones are allowing more people to use the Internet on the fly; this in turn will allow customers to use Google.com and its services more often.