“We had a very strong quarter,” said CEO Larry Page on a conference call with press and analysts, “Since becoming CEO again, I have pushed hard to focus on the big bets.”

Page described the creation of a new class of stock as enabling the founders to keep corporate decision-making amongst a small group, allowing the company to continue to take a longer-term view on the business.

Though Page and Sergey Brin, in a 2012 founders’ letter, say they know some won’t be happy about the decision, “…after careful consideration with our board of directors, we have decided that maintaining this founder-led approach is in the best interests of Google, our shareholders and our users. Having the flexibility to use stock without diluting our structure will help ensure we are set up for success for decades to come.”

Page pointed to projects like Google Chrome, Android, and YouTube as examples of initiatives that have benefited from a long-term approach, because they have taken years to develop into especially strong products.

The decision begs speculation about what Google may be planning to do with its stock — acquisitions, perhaps? — that it wants to do without granting voting rights. But, in the letter, the founders address this, saying: “we don’t have an unusually big acquisition planned, in case you were wondering.”

Although the creation of a new class of stock is currently only a proposal, it’s expected to have no problem being adopted at the next shareholder’s meeting, given that Page and Brin back it.

CPCs Continue To Dive, While Clicks Rise

Some of the most interesting numbers have to do with trends in cost-per-click and overall clicks. The company’s average CPCs decreased 12% over the first quarter of last year, and they were down 6% over the fourth quarter of 2011, as well. But the company was able to keep revenues rising by increasing the number of clicks — they grew around 39% over the first quarter of 2011 and approximately 7% over the fourth quarter. The trends confirm reports from major search marketing agencies released earlier this week.

Asked about what was driving these trends — especially the decline in CPCs — SVP and chief business officer Nikesh Arora attributed it to a mix of complex factors including the growth of mobile and tablet activity versus desktop, the interplay between emerging and more developed markets, foreign exchange effects, the dynamic between network and Google properties, and ad quality changes.

“The dynamics  are very complicated,” said Arora. “If anything, the recent lower CPCs present a bigger opportunity to attract advertisers.” Arora also stressed that “the most important thing for you to know is that the business is healthy.”

The Mobile Opportunity

As Arora noted, the growth of mobile is generally acknowledged to be behind some of the CPC drop, because mobile doesn’t yet monetize as well as desktop. But this also confirms that mobile is one of the largest areas of opportunity for Google. Tablets, in particular, are proving to be well-known as shopping devices, and the Google executives said the company is putting the pieces in place to take advantage of the trends.

“People always spend the most money on whatever the major source of traffic or revenue is,” said Page, acknowledging that desktop clicks and impressions are still garnering the largest spend by advertisers. “I think over time it will reverse….We’re very bullish in that area and we’re making a lot of investments.”

Investments discussed include global efforts to bring small local businesses online, to help advertisers build mobile sites, and to improve mobile advertising capabilities to better serve these needs.(A better click-to-download capability for mobile ads promoting apps was mentioned as an example of improvements in ad formats.) Additionally, Page said he foresees improvements in the ability to make local transactions via a smartphone to work in Google’s favor in the long term.

Where Is Google Making Its Money?

Google’s owned-and-operated properties accounted for the majority (69%) of its total revenues in the quarter. It brought in $7.31 billion from its own sites, or 24% more than last year’s revenues for the same period.

Partner sites that carry Google advertising generated revenues of $2.91 billion, or 27% of the company’s revenues. This network revenue grew 20% from the first quarter of 2011.

Google continues to make slightly less than half of its money in the United States. Revenues from outside the U.S. totalled $5.77 billion, or 54% of all revenues. The company was particularly strong in the United Kingdom, where it brought in $1.15 billion, or 11% of total revenues.

Those advertising distribution partners and other sources of traffic received $2.51 billion in all in the first quarter, meaning that traffic acquisition costs (TAC) rose from $2.05 billion in the same period in 2011. However, TAC remained steady (at 25%) when looked at as a percentage of advertising revenues.

Where Does Google+ Fit In?

Though Google+ has become something of a whipping boy in social media circles, Page indicated that he was very happy with the progress of the initiative. He said to think of Google+ as having two different parts.

First, and most highly developed currently, is what Page called the “social spine” — this is the social element that Google+ brings to all of the other services the company provides, when users “upgrade” to using it.

“170 million people have now upgraded to Google+,” Page said.

As for the other part — that is the “social destination”. Page said this should be judged as the new product it is. By that measure, he said, it is showing “very healthy growth.”

Maturation As A Marketing Medium?

It’s an indication of how Google has “grown up” that the company will be hosting its first upfront for YouTube in May in New York. Arora says the video service has “gone from being an interesting place for brands to be, to being a must-buy. Now they [advertisers and agencies] are seeing the benefits of using the web for branding.”

The company is also working on packaging YouTube with its display ad inventory and developing better methods of cross-media measurement.

“We’re seeing a big breakthrough with brands,” Arora said.

But Google will bring its own performance-oriented perspective, of course.

“Advertisers are interested in ROI,” noted Page. “They don’t care [whether it's mobile or desktop or TV]. We have immense amounts of inventory, even inventory through our network. What we should do is dynamically allocate throughout these products to allow them to get the maximum ROI.”

Google’s taken flak over the past year from critics about how the company has been integrating actions such as booking flights or hotels into its search results. It’s also faced criticisms that it is leveraging its search dominance to build its Google+ social network. I found it notable that Google CEO Larry Page, in his “2012 Update from the CEO“ letter, essentially pushed back against both criticisms.

Page doesn’t say he’s attacking these criticisms in the update. That’s my own reading between-the-lines. But nothing in the letter would have been presented without a good reason. I think both areas got addressed as part of Google’s continued positioning that what it’s doing with Google+ and with task completion isn’t polluting its search results nor acting anti-competitively but rather simply evolving search.

Google’s Push With Google+

Google’s held nothing back in trying to make Google+ successful. The company, which used to never advertise on television, now routinely seems to have commercials pushing its social network. Speaking of pushing, in January, as part of Search Plus Your World, it pushed its own ads further down in its search results to allow for a “People and Pages on Google+” box to appear.

Those are just two examples among many where Google has been putting its weight behind Google+. But doing this has opened it up to some accusations. Is Google using its dominance in search to unfairly jumpstart its own social network? Is Google ruining its search results by shoving too much Google+ content within them?

The head of Google’s search efforts, Amit Singhal, has previously argued that Google+ is an important part of advancing Google’s search quality. I believe he’s generally right.

Both Google and Bing are using social signals — and need to use them — as a way to further improve results. My story from February, When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building, explains more about this and the challenge in getting the balance right.

Google+ Needed To Improve Search

Page’s letter adds a further defense. He wrote:

Understanding identity and relationships can also help us improve search.

In other words, for Google to improve, it needs to understand who people really are on the web, plus what they care about. That’s where Google+ comes in, a way for it to better understand relationships as well as who is authoring content. Google had such profiles even before Google+ existed, and Google+ is a continuation of this.

Expect this also to be used as a defense of why Google+ need to exist regardless of players like Facebook or Twitter. Page is reemphasizing that profiles are part of search. They’re not just some social add-on. They’re a key ingredient that any search engine needs.

Fear Not The Personalization

Page also pushes back on concerns about personalization:

Imagine how much better search would be if we added… you. Say you’ve been studying computer science for awhile like me, then the information you need won’t be that helpful to a relative novice and vice versa. If you’re searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person—not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care about.

Recall that we just had a survey showing that Americans apparently consider personalized search not just to be bad but also an invasion of their privacy: Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion.

The problem is, no one is going to have a positive reaction if you ask if search engines should “track” what people search for to personalize results for them, in my opinion. But if you rephrase that question such as:

• If you’ve searched for “travel,” then immediately search for “spain,” do you think it makes sense for search engines to look at both and give you results about “spanish travel?”
• If you’re searching for football in the UK, do you think search engine should look at your location and provide information about UK football — soccer — rather than the NFL?

There are very good reasons that personalization can be helpful, as I wrote before. But personalization doesn’t sound good when it’s not presented along with real, helpful examples.

Page tries at this, but I didn’t think it was that successful. Google’s Singhal did a better take late last year. But make no mistake. Personalization is being mentioned by Page to help prop it up as an essential, helpful thing for Google to be doing.

Search Needs Social & If Other Social Networks Don’t Want To Share…

Page also argues that Google+ itself is an essential part of search and gets in a swipe at Facebook and Twitter:

Privacy considerations certainly limit the information that can be shared between platforms—even if the third parties hosting it were willing to work with Google, which hasn’t always been the case.

Google+ helps solve this problem for us because it enables Google to understand people and their connections….

This kind of next-generation search in which Google understands real-world entities—things, not strings—will help improve our results in exciting new ways. It’s about building genuine knowledge into our search engine.

As I said, Google’s come under fire that it’s favoring its own social network. Page effectively pushes back with a critical distinction. Google+ isn’t social; Google+ is part of search. Google needs to have it to run its search engine, and you can expect to hear that argument again and again, especially as the FTC explores Google+ as part of its on-going anti-trust investigation of Google.

You can also expect to hear Google continue to argue, as it has done already, that it is open to including social network’s data. Of course, there are very good reasons why Facebook and Twitter don’t want to share with Google. A Proposal For Social Network Détente, which I wrote earlier this year, explains more about this and some potential cooperation points all around.

Actions & Fair Search Results

Page moves on to a section called “Taking Actions” that especially seems designed to push back on accusations that Google is favoring its own services over those of competitors.

A good search engine should provide the best results possible, not just those that are in its own interests. Some have argued that Google, by showing results from its own shopping search engine or travel search engine, is favoring itself over that user interest as well as competitors. There’s even an argument that doing so violates anti-trust laws, given Google’s dominance in search.

To understand these arguments more, I highly recommend the stories below for more background:

• The Incredible Stupidity Of Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine
• Bing’s Travel Search & Kayak Favoritism Angers No One, While Google’s Gets Headline Attention From WSJ
• Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either
• Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”
• To Understand Google Favoritism, Think “If Google+ Were YouTube”

In most cases, I find the arguments against Google to be laughable, on the order of someone objecting that the New York Times doesn’t show the entertainment section from the Los Angeles Times, therefore government regulation is required.

It gets more complicated in some situations, especially where Google properties are destinations (such as YouTube or Google+) as opposed to be outbound-pointing search engines (such as Google Maps or Google Shopping).

Is Search Also Task Completion?

It gets even more complicated where Google is allowing for direct transactions to happen, such as booking flights or hotels. That’s one reason you saw companies like TripAdvisor and Expedia make formal anti-trust complaints to the European Union about Google last week.

Both companies, along with others including Microsoft, are part of the FairSearch group that singles out Google as being anti-competitive, even though many of the exact same complaints can be pointed at Microsoft-backed Bing. You can book hotels and flights directly at Bing, with Kayak getting preferred placement through a deal.

Page makes an important pivot to say that search isn’t just getting links to information but that it’s also about conducting actions right within the search results or getting direct answers within them:

In the early days of Google you would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and you would move on fairly happily. Today you want more. If you search for “weather san francisco”, chances are you want… the weather in San Francisco right there on the results page, not another click or two away. So that’s what we now provide

Truly great search is all about turning your needs into actions in the blink of an eye.

Page isn’t the first to say such things. Bing has been pushing on the idea that it’s a “decision engine” since Microsoft relaunched its search engine in 2009. It really hasn’t delivered on that promise of doing direct actions much more than Google, I’d say. Both have direct answers, which were commonly provided as far back as 2004 among the major search engines. As for task completion, both Google and Bing offer this in relatively limited ways.

Task completion — actions — are likely to grow, however. As they already have, it has been Google that’s come under pressure for potentially locking out competitors. Google Flight Search, made possible by the ITA acquisition that attracted so much scrutiny, as well as Google Hotel Finder, both especially stand out. Page pulls them into the protective umbrella of being part of core search, in his update:

Last year, for example, we welcomed ITA Software to the Google family. They have strong relationships with the airline industry, and using that data we can now provide more relevant results for travel queries. This means that if you search for “flights from chicago to los angeles”, you get a list of the most relevant flights with prices, and you can book directly with the airline—or click on an ad for an online travel agency.

We’re also experimenting with a feature called Hotel Finder, which enables you to compare prices and book a hotel room right from the results page. It’s all about speeding things up so users can get on with the things that matter in their lives.

See, there’s no anti-trust wrong-doing here, nothing to see. This is just all part of Google being a good search engine, Page seems to be saying. Whether regulators believe that remains to be see. But Google, which has already been arguing many of these points, seems to be refreshing its playbook with Page’s letter.

Related Articles

• Larry Page Gives An “Update” After His First Year As CEO
• Make Love, Not Evil — The New Google Motto?
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy
• Pimping Google+ In Search Works: Lady Gaga Finally Joins Google+
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building
• Google’s “Me On The Web” Pushes Google Profiles — Take That, Facebook?
• Report: FTC Expanding Anti-Trust Investigation Of Google To Include Google+
• A Proposal For Social Network Détente
• On Google & Being “Evil”
• Survey: Nearly 80% Trust Google As Much Or More Than A Year Ago

Stone declines to query Page about privacy, antitrust and Google’s myriad problems with regulators and governments around the world. In his answers about a range of issues, Page is confident and seemingly reflective. However his responses suggest Page still regards Google as the cool tech company that was generally beloved by all but its competitors.

Levy on the other hand points out the ways in which that image no longer applies. While Levy celebrates Page’s “focus” and “impatience,” he also identifies Google’s very real legal and “political” vulnerabilities today:

Google was once widely viewed as a feisty startup, an underdog that was on the side of the people; now people increasingly see it as a mighty and distant power that knows too much about them.

This shift in perception is dangerous to Google. It provides cover to politicians and regulators (many of whom are being lobbied furiously by Google’s competitors) who want to hobble a company that seems to have a troubling amount of power. The constant scrutiny of the DOJ and the FTC have already hurt Google considerably: when considering acquisitions, there’s not only the possibility that government will block the move — there’s the certainty that the long approval process will lower the value of the purchase.

One of the more interesting exchanges in the Brad Stone article is the discussion of Steve Jobs’ rage against Google for “stealing” the look and feel of Android. Page argues that it was all an act:

I think the Android differences were actually for show . . . I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.

This is a curious response and probably inaccurate given the myriad other accounts of Jobs’ anger toward Google (he ousted Eric Schmidt from the Apple board, for example). It’s unclear whether Page’s remarks are spin, a rationalization or whether Page genuinely believes what he’s saying.

And just as Jobs seemed to be fixated on Android, Page seems equally fixated on Facebook. Though he says, “You don’t want to be looking at your competitors” he takes a couple of shots at Facebook in the Bloomberg Story:

I mean, our friends at Facebook have imported many, many, many Gmail addresses and exported zero addresses. And they claim that users don’t own that data, which is a totally specious claim. It’s completely unreasonable.

The Facebook fixation and related product changes (i.e., privacy policy changes, SPYW) that aim to capture and deliver against the kind of personal data that Facebook possesses may ultimately damage Google more than they help the company. That will only be revealed in time.

Both articles suggest that Page is doing well from an internal, management perspective and generally well regarded as a CEO. He’s even characterized as “charming.”

One potential antidote to some of the image problems that Levy identifies is a more public Page. Perhaps he just needs to bring a little of that personal charm more out in the open. The Bloomberg article may signal that he’s going to start doing so.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson emphasized to me that the Bloomberg/BusinessWeek article is an “excerpt” from a “forthcoming magazine story,” which presumably will explore antitrust and privacy issues — major issues for Google today — in some depth.

NOTE: See our own follow-up analysis, No, Google Doesn’t Make Four Times More Off The iPhone Vs. Android

The publication reports “Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011.” It further derived an average revenue per Android handset per year figure of $10.

Interestingly this is a figure that Eric Schmidt estimated Google could make off each Android user. In 2010, then CEO Eric Schmidt speculated that Android would become a $10 billion revenue stream if a billion users generated $10 per year for Google. And in early 2011 Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated that Android was generating about $5.90 per user for Google and saw that figure growing to $9.85 in 2012.

The Guardian also estimated that Google made roughly $30 per year, per PC with a couple of caveats.

Earlier this month Macquarie Capital estimated that in 2011 Google made just over $1.3 billion in paid search revenue from its default position on iOS devices. Apparently Google gave the lion’s share of that back to Apple under the terms of a default search agreement between the two companies.

In other words, Google made more (top-line) revenue in one year from the iPhone than it did in three years from Android handsets.

If Google activates 800,000 Android devices daily it would mean 292 million devices activated per year. Using the $10 per user, per year revenue formula that would translate into $2.92 billion in global Android revenue over the course of a hypothetical year.

Below is a Google mobile revenues forecast from Cowen and Company. It shows $5.8 billion in revenue this year.

Mobile is becoming an increasingly strategic part of Google’s business and one of the places where the greatest growth is occurring.

Postscript: Upon closer inspection of the settlement document that apparently forms the basis for The Guardian’s analysis, it’s very difficult to verify the accuracy of the claims and estimates above. The numbers may therefore be highly untrustworthy. See our own follow-up analysis, No, Google Doesn’t Make Four Times More Off The iPhone Vs. Android.

Postscript II: Google told us Friday that the figures appearing in the court documents that The Guardian relied upon have no relationship to current Android revenues.

Related Entries

• Google Will Make $10 Per Android User In 2012: Report
• US Subpoenas Apple For Details About Default iOS Google Search Deal
• Report: 25 Percent Of Paid-Search Clicks Will Come From Mobile By December

While we already provided coverage of the keynote via Greg Sterling’s live blog of the conversation, we also have several video clips that our readers may have missed — and that attendees may want to revisit.

Susan Wojcicki On Google+ & Personalized Search

Susan Wojcicki On Google’s Privacy Policy Changes

Susan Wojcicki On The Creep Factor & “Do Not Track”

Susan Wojcicki: Mobile Is Finally Here!

Susan Wojcicki On Why Google Buys Companies

Susan Wojcicki On Hosting Google In Her Garage

Susan Wojcicki’s Background

Susan Wojcicki: The Whole Interview

Click here to view the embedded video.

Susan Wojcicki: Audience Q&A (several questions on a variety of topics)

You can also see these videos and more on the Search Marketing Expo YouTube channel.

Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki are now seated for her on-stage keynote interview this morning at SMX West. It’s a capacity crowd as Chris Sherman introduces Wojcicki as “one of the 50 most influential business executives” (Forbes). He also characterizes her as someone “you may not have heard of at Google.”

Chris then leads off with a humorous slide-show of famous garages in Silicon Valley and beyond: HP, Apple, Google, Walt Disney and Amazon. Now the serious part begins. (The dialogue below is paraphrased.)

The Early Days 

Chris: When you first let Larry and Sergey into your garage did you have any idea what you’d be getting into?

Wojcicki: We had just bought our house and I convinced by husband that we could afford the mortgage if we rented part of it out. So we rented the garage to help pay our mortgage. They [Page, Brin] weren’t allowed to walk in through the front door.

(Wojcicki was working at Intel immediately before she began at Google.)

She says that the more she used Google in those early days the more she realized what an important product it was. She had her “aha” moment when the servers went down one day and Google was unavailable; she really felt its absence.

Reflections on Changes in AdSense

Danny: What are the biggest shifts in AdSense from 2003 (when you last spoke at this conference)?

Wojcicki: We have lots more formats and controls for Google display ads now. I could never have anticipated how sophisticated AdSense would become and how many options and controls would develop for advertisers. For example, now we have exchanges and real-time bidding.

Google’s Privacy Policy Changes

Chris is the first to raise privacy issues with the impending changes to Google’s privacy policy. “You’re being transparent about what you’re doing but you’re getting a lot of flack.” Chris asks her to explain how privacy issues may impact Google’s display network and targeting capabilities in the future.

Wojcicki: We’re trying to balance advertiser and consumer interests. We did not have a cookie on the AdSense network until we acquired DoubleClick. She goes on to explain Google’s three main principles around privacy:

• Control (users can opt out)
• Notification (information about who’s serving the ads, etc.)
• Transparency (e.g., ad preference manager)

Most people don’t really understand this (privacy). The more you can explain things in a simple way to them the more they can make choices. This is what Google is striving for she says.

People have always been concerned about new technologies. But we’ve tried to be clear and notify people about what we’re doing. We’re trying to be transparent and explain things in simple English.

At the end of the day there is going to be change, this is new. People need to understand it, they’re trying digest it.

Danny is empathizing with Google around the challenges of making privacy policy changes and the regulatory scrutiny the company is getting. He asks why is this scrutiny not happening to Google’s competitors.

Wojcicki declines to comment on why others are receiving the same attention. She says there’s misunderstanding around what’s happening, however. She says the changes are ultimately about building better products “because we understand more about you.”  We want to enable our products to talk more together and make better products by better understanding our users.

That’s what’s really driving our privacy policy changes, she says. When we actually make changes we’ll notify our users about what’s happening.

On Acquisitions She’s Been Involved With

Chris asks about what acquisitions Wojcicki has been involved with. She says YouTube and DoubleClick, among others. She says that she’s involved with most of the ad-related acquisitions.

Wojcicki: If we don’t think we can build it or do it fast enough . . . that’s when we think about buying companies. Time to market is a factor. Time matters. DoubleClick has been a wonderful acquisition for us; so has YouTube.

She adds that are a lot of “people dynamics” when you acquire a company.

Google+ (and Safarigate) 

Danny asks about the Safari opt-in cookie workaround. Wojcicki says “there’s been a lot of coverage” about Safari and “we acknowledged the mistake.” We’re still in the process of fixing it. We’re fixing it as fast as we can. We try and acknowledge mistakes and fix them.

If a user opts-in to our services how does that work in a situation like Safari, which has a default opt-out? “But we’ve acknowledged our mistake.”

Retargeting, the “Creep Factor” and “Do Not Track”  

Wojcicki: Retargeting works because it’s effective. She cites SMX conference ad targeting as an example of successful retargeting. “I was seeing my face [on that ad] on every site I visited.”  She says, “Everything is a balance at the end of the day. Users want to see ads are useful and relevant. But we need to make sure that users are comfortable with it.”

Danny asks about how “do not track” might work (or not) with retargeting. The Obama consumer privacy bill of rights is an industry initiative, she says. Google is fully participating: “We’ve made recommendations that are very balanced.”

Users will have the ability to opt-out. But we’ll need to track some things to prevent fraud and make sure that “the internet continues to work.”

Moving into Social “in a Big Way” 

Chris: Google+ has implications for users and advertisers as well. He invites her to comment on the advertiser side of Google+.

Wojcicki: The first step is for advertisers to have Google+ pages. “That’s step uno. Be on Google; have a Google+ page.”  Hangouts provides a really interesting way for businesses to provide customer support and other services. She cites several examples of companies using Hangouts.

We’ve enabled ads to be +1′d. The idea is that ads work just like content. “That’s the way the real world works.” She likens Google+ and +1s to word of mouth and recommendations.

Danny: Define what Google+ means for Google. What are the top 5 things Google hopes to get from Google+?

Wojcicki: This is part of the next generation of Google products. Our users are logged in and they’re telling thing about themselves. We can customize results in ways that we couldn’t otherwise. It’s a way to work across our products and create more relevance and personal experiences for users.

She rhetorically asks: How will search be different 10 years from now? If I type in “best vacations,” should I get the same results as everyone else? How do we make the information more useful, relevant. Google+ is about moving to that next generation experience, making search better and more relevant.

“Mobile Is Finally Here”

Chris: Every year we talk about the year of mobile; is mobile finally here?

Wojcicki: We can’t live without our smartphones. But in terms of ads, there are a lot of advertisers and SEMs who don’t have mobile landing pages. That’s the first step. Then: how to you add location? How do you make creative more interactive? Especially on tablets; those creatives can be really interactive and engaging.

Mobile is really here, she says.

Wojcicki also discusses click to call. She explains that PPC and C2C were linked in the beginning but then Google enabled the ability to bid separately on calls.

Danny: how’s that going? Wojcicki: It’s been good. She expounds on the virtues and value of calls — especially for local merchants.

About the Last Earnings Call and the Decline of Paid Clicks

Wojcicki: We did have a change in CPCs last quarter and it did surprise some investors.  We do make changes from time to time and they affect paid clicks sometimes. We try and think holistically about the page.

(I missed a good deal of the discussion here.)

On Her Background and Her Parents’ Influence

Chris asks Wojcicki about how her parents’ influence shaped her. (Her dad is a Stanford physics professor and her mom is a teacher.) She says that growing up on the Stanford campus gave her a passion and appreciation for knowledge. At Google there is a similar passion . . . to help people to discover and find information.

Wojcicki: My grandmother was a librarian at the Library of Congress for a long time. Google is the “modern version” of that. In some ways I feel like I’m following that tradition.

Q&A Session: 

Q: how do you balance pushing out new product features (in AdWords) with the need to keep your advertisers and advertising ecosystem efficient in their daily lives.

Wojcicki: Our goal is to do both — to offer new features that will drive more leads and improve the user experience. But we also try to focus on things that need improvement and offer the next version of features we already have.

We’re trying to go back and figure out, what are the essential features and how to we streamline and simplify them for advertisers?  I’m trying to give our engineering team visibility into the core issues that advertisers face.

Q: Comment: organic results are being pushed down the page. Are organic results being deemphasized because you’re getting pressure [missed reference to sources of pressure] . . .

Wojcicki: She says that organic results aren’t being deemphasized but says, “We have added features to ads and they are taking up more space” (with sitelinks, etc.). But sometimes ads are the most useful and relevant information if someone is looking to buy something. Our decisions are driven by trying to come up with the right experience for the “whole page,” balancing between search results and the ads.

Q: The individual asks about how ads are presented as a negative to users and what does Google think about that.

Wojcicki: Advertising can be really compelling and useful. The question is making it relevant, showing the right ads at the right time. If we’re successful then users will be less irritated by ads. Ads are just information.

Danny: Will online ads get to the place where we actually like the ads — like Super Bowl ads where we tune in to watch them?

Wojcicki: How do we get to the place where we offer rich experiences in advertising and make those experiences more personal? That’s what we’re trying to do. She cites the yellow pages: “Everything you see in the yellow pages you see is an ad. The bigger ads are generally seen as better.”

Danny: What’s the “next big thing” (major paraphrase)?

Wojcicki: I’ll tell you my most amazing ad experience. She goes on to discuss the experience of trying to find a Chinese (Mandarin) teach for her three year old daughter. She got recommendations from friends in email and Gmail matched the teacher’s actual ad (with contact info) to the Gmail messages. “It was completely serendipitous.”

And we’re done.

Bill Slawski spotted the transfer of ownership of these patent applications this morning. The patents transfer to Google from Cuil include 20090240672, 20090240685, 20090241044, 20090241018, 20090241058, 20090241065 and 20090241066.

This is not all that surprising, being that one of the co-founders, Anna Patterson joined Google the same month Cuil went offline.

Related Stories:

• Cuil Goes Offline, Future Not So Cool
• Anna Patterson, Cuil Founder, Returns To Google
• Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
• Cuil Announces New Layout, Other Updates
• Cuil Launches Timeline To Search Results
• Cuil Jumps On The Real-Time Search Bandwagon
• Cuil Fast Test – Relevancy Isn’t A Google Killer
• Cuil Maplines: A Good Idea That Needs Work
• Google To Gain Access To Over 1.5 Million European Patent Documents

Microsoft quickly learned about the issue on their support forums and issued a patch yesterday to address the issue. Microsoft didn’t explain it was a Google specific issue but said:

On February 14, 2012, an incorrect detection for Exploit:JS/Blacole.BW was introduced. On February 14, 2012, Microsoft released an update that addresses the issue. Signature versions 1.119.1988.0 and higher include this update.

Of course, I am sure Microsoft didn’t mind some of those Google users looking for other search engines to use for the day.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl and index their websites.

One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.

Cutts’ visit to South Korea comes on the heels of tension between the government and Google. Earlier this month, the Korean Fair Trade Commission accused Google of interfering with its Android antitrust investigation. The commission alleges that Google deleted documents pertinent to its investigation into whether Google is limiting access to local search engines on Android smartphones.

There’s also the matter that South Korea is one of only a handful of countries where Google isn’t the dominant search engine. And, as the WSJ points out, Google isn’t likely to gain market share in Korea if prominent websites aren’t in its index.

While Cutts may have the title of being Google’s chief spam cop, he’s long been one of the companies go-to public faces. A little more than a year ago, Google sent him to Washington, DC on an “educational tour” aimed at telling government officials that Google’s search results don’t need to be regulated.

Beyond Blame, Believing In Cooperation

Let’s set aside blame, because blame isn’t going to move anything forward.

Let’s also assume that all the players can be taken to some degree at their word, that they do indeed want to work together in some ways.

What does everyone want?

The Wants & A Game Changer

Google has wanted its own social graph for some time. By social graph, I mean a way for it to see how people are interconnected, which could potentially improve Google’s search results. Better ways to target ads, new “sticky” content where people spend huge amounts of time are other things it wants, but let’s focus on the search aspects.

Twitter has wanted, well, clearly money along with other non-disclosed things for what is mistakenly assumed to be its most valuable asset, its “firehose” of tweets. What’s really Twitter’s most valuable asset is actually its sharing activity, but I’ll get back to that.

Facebook has wanted, well, I don’t know — maybe to be the best social network out there. Don’t laugh. If Google once had a laser-like focus on being the best search engine out there, Facebook can have the same focus on social. That’s a vision that Facebook probably doesn’t want ruined by Google encroaching on its territory. A vision that, of course, makes Facebook plenty of money by tapping into social actions.

We also now have something new that both Facebook and Twitter say they want — to be better represented in Google’s search results. It’s not as if they haven’t been there. But releasing today’s Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet — which alters the Google’s Search Plus Your World service — was a game changer in these Cold War years between the search and social superpowers.

The Bill Of Social Data Rights

Can everyone get what they want, all succeeding in their own ways, without further banging of virtual shoes in outrage?

I think they can. Or at least, I think there are some ways forward, some common ground that has emerged. I’ll lay these out in what I’ll call a Bill Of Social Data Rights. I’m open to better names, believe me — that name I know has been used for other things than I’m covering. But hopefully you get the point.

1) Public Is Public

If someone posts something public on a social network, that’s public for any search engine to index. It’s not up to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to decide if Google or Bing get to index it through some special deal. The content of what was written belongs to the person who wrote it. If that person publishes publicly, then search engines can spider what they find.

Posts are, after all, web pages. People who create them can choose to block them from search engines if they want. People can choose to withdraw public posts after they’ve been published and know that, like with any web page, the posts will eventually be dropped from search engines.

Social networks have lots of content. Search engines like Google and Bing could bring them to a halt, if they tried to grab everything without special arrangements. So make the “firehose” arrangements, and make them on behalf of the users, who might actually want to find their own content in the search engines of their choice.

This helps solves, by the way, the concerns that Facebook and Twitter have raised about not being included enough in Google. Much of their content is included. Much more of it could be included, if deal making was set aside in favor of the Public Is Public principle.

2) Profiles Are Meta Data

If someone creates a public profile, certain types of information from that profile should be expressed in an easy, machine-readable format. Any social network should provide the profile’s name, the number of followers, the number of people being followed, as well as a flag to indicate if a profile is somehow verified or trusted. A trusted way to link that profile to other profiles or web sites should be implemented.

Search engines need this type of information, so that they really know who someone is, in order to return search results. That’s true even if the person is using a pseudonym. You still want to know that the pseudonym account that comes up is the right one, not some faker.

Providing meta data abut profiles will help. Search engines won’t have to guess where to scrape for key information such as follower counts, which can be used to tell if an account might be real or not, in the case of celebrities. Cross-linkage can help avoid problems that both Google and the Don’t Be Evil tool have, where Larry Page gets listed with Facebook and Twitter profiles that aren’t really his.

If Facebook and Twitter really want better inclusion in things like “People & Pages” listings at Google, this type of data will help. Similarly, if Bing wants to include Google+ profiles, it could use the information as well.

3) Your Friends Are Yours

If I have friends on one service, I should be able to import those friends in some machine-readable format to another service. That doesn’t mean a list of text names, as Facebook’s tool will kick out for me.

It might mean email addresses, as Facebook will give me for Yahoo or Microsoft but not for Google.

It really means some way that the geniuses at our social networks can concoct, I’m sure, so that if I want to find my Twitter friends at Google+, I can. If I want Path to know a particular Google+ circle of friends I have, I can do that. If Pinterest wants to know my Facebook friends, they are my friends to take — not Facebook’s to decide.

What is there really to fear, by allowing this? Even if I take my 50 friends to a new social network, if that social network is crap, no great victory has been won. Heck, taking the names doesn’t mean any of the 50 will actually follow me over.

4) Social Shares & Social Actions Are Proprietary

The real gem each of the social networks has isn’t our posts, isn’t our profiles, isn’t our friends. It’s knowing what we do, how we interact with our friends, how we interact with content.

That’s where the walls should remain. Facebook and Twitter, for example, have real reasons to fear that handing over streams of data to Google might allow it to better understand how people are acting on their services.

So don’t. Make content public, yes. But find a way to agree that the actions — the number of tweets, the number of likes, whatever — are declared off-limits for use by other search engines. If things like robots.txt and the nofollow attribute can work for search, the social networks can figure out their own mechanisms.

Moving Forward

Does everyone get what they really want with this?

Google already has a social graph that’s building in Google+. It really doesn’t need to be worried about getting social shares or actions from the other services — though if they want to offer this, that’s their option. But giving Google the additional information I’ve outlined will allow it to do a better job of exposing content from these other services in search.

Twitter doesn’t get some big payday for its feed, but it’s not getting that now. What it does gain is people who stop complaining they can’t find their own tweets. It gains the chance that with decent meta data, Google will rethink the Google+ification of its search results and return to the idea that search results can be social using anyone’s network. And Twitter’s content gains more exposure, important for a service that more and more talks about itself as being a content play.

Facebook gets even more exposure within Google than it has now. Opening up keeps pressure on Google, as with Twitter, that there can’t just be some Google+ification with the excuse that Google has no choice, because Facebook won’t do a deal. And Facebook potentially avoids the anti-trust critics that almost certainly will come for it in a few years, just as they’ve come for Google now, claiming that Facebook is staying to closed and using its market dominance to keep others out.

I know these proposals may sound naive. Some of what I describe might already exist. But we do need a way forward. Search and social have been colliding, but we don’t need a collision. We need a collusion, and not in the negative sense but a collusion where the users really are being served best by the services they depend on. That can happen, even supporting healthy competition, but without the social superpowers going to war.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Related Stories

Looking to understand more about some of the issues in the data war between Google, Facebook and Twitter? See especially the first two articles:

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+