KEY POINTS:
What impact will the global economic crisis have on internet marketing in general and Google's business in particular?
From an online perspective, and particularly from a search perspective, we believe the opportunities are still tremendous, certainly in New Zealand.
As budgets tighten and it gets more difficult to generate income, search provides marketers with a flexible, targeted and measurable way to reach customers.
Customers are going more online. People are spending more of their media time online [and are also increasingly going online] to research products and services they may want to purchase.
Is the New Zealand online advertising market underdeveloped?
I think you would say that about most of the online markets around the world. About 25 per cent of people's media time is spent online but advertising budgets lag far behind.
In New Zealand [the online sector's share of total advertising spend is] 5.8 per cent. This showcases the fact that there's a massive opportunity for advertisers.
Clearly consumers are already [online] looking for products and services.
Whom do you blame for that discrepancy between the large amount of time people spend online and the small amount companies spend advertising online?
I don't blame anyone. There are a lot of factors that have led to this.
The internet, and search as part of it, is still very new and it is normal in most markets that you create a market with consumers first before you can monetise it.
This is a fact of life in many industries. There are a number of things that have contributed to the slowness of adoption [of online advertising].
A great deal of work needs to be done by the online companies to educate the agencies and advertising partners about the market and a lot of that work falls to Google itself.
We probably have been a little slower than we should have to invest in New Zealand. We've remedied this over the last year. We now have a strong team in New Zealand that is able to have discussions with our clients and [advertising] agencies and we see education as a very important part of the growth potential for the industry.
Will web-searching continue to evolve?
There is more and more content being put on the web every day and in different formats.
One of the keys for us is to continue improving our search algorithm, providing users with ways to search images, search videos. We're doing an enormous amount of work on this.
We're doing an enormous amount of work on translation services.
Two-thirds of the world is non-English speaking so there are tremendous opportunities and challenges in solving the translation problem.
We see that search is going to play a more and more critical role in helping people find the information they want and in helping businesses find the customers they want.
But to do that we need to evolve to provide better services to our users.
[SearchWiki, a Google service launched last week] enables you to rank and delete websites that are more relevant, or not relevant, to your searches, and websites that you want to keep seeing at the top of your queries.
That's a refinement that personalises your ability to search, and is a very important way we're improving our service.
Outside of search, Google continues to develop a string of other products and services including the Google Apps online software package, which has been taken up by Auckland and Waikato Universities as a service for students and staff. Have you licensed Google Apps to any New Zealand businesses?
We're having a number of discussions, although there is no one I can mention right now.
We believe very strongly in the Apps business and we believe it presents tremendous opportunities. So far we've done a lot of education deals and we're seeing a lot of business clients being more and more interested.
We think the future is very bright for our Apps enterprise and certainly New Zealand is a prominent market in that regard.
Google's growing reach across all aspects of the online world concerns some observers, resulting in allegations as extreme as claims that the company has a plot for world domination. How do you respond?
The most important thing for Google is user trust.
We will never breach that user trust. Users of all our products always have the ability to do something else at all times.
When they're on search, they can go and use another search engine at the click of a mouse. When they're on [Google's email product] Gmail they can quit Gmail and upload their contacts onto another email system.
User trust is important to Google. We will cherish and maintain that to the end of our days.
