Stocks, Google | featured news

As the search volume on generic terms such as "debt", "portfolio" and "stocks" fell, the Dow Jones average tended to go up - and vice versa. An investment strategy based on these search volume data between 2004 and 2011 would have made a profit of 326%.

Google's stock price topped $800 for the first time Monday amid renewed confidence in the company's ability to reap steadily higher profits from its dominance of Internet search and prominence in the increasingly important mobile device market.

Google Inc.’s stock plunged suddenly on Thursday afternoon after a contractor released the search company’s third-quarter earnings report early, by mistake. The stock fell $68.19, or 9 percent, to $687.30 before trading was halted to give investors a chance to digest the news. Google’s report had been slated for release after the close of regular trading Thursday.

Google Inc announced a stock split designed to preserve the control of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin over the No. 1 Web search engine, as it posted revenue in line with estimates.

With Google incessantly branching out into even more ventures such as music and social networking, its search business could continue to act as a minor Catch-22 situation in future by helping competition in other business lines.

Google recently announced its Q2 2011 earnings on July 14, 2011. [1] For the quarter, total advertising revenues surged by about 33% over Q2 2010 values driven by increased paid clicks as well as higher cost-per-click rates over the same quarter last year.

Morgan Stanley analysts downgraded Google Inc shares to "equal-weight" from "overweight" on Friday, citing an expected decline in margins in this year and the next.

Monahan contends the stock has over-reacted to the impact of recent changes in Google’s search algorithm that were designed to reduce the prominence of lower quality content sites in search results. The analyst contends the move likely will have a single-digit impact to the company’s earnings, but has resulted in a 40% drop in the stock price since mid-April, leaving the stock 20% below its IPO price. He contends the recent price of the shares “reflects future negative changes that are unlikely to materialize.”

A strong holiday shopping season will help Google Inc beat Wall Street's quarterly targets again, but investors may need more convincing to buy into the Internet giant's longer-term future.

Akamai’s real-time ad targeting solution could well be an important growth driver in the future for the company given the growing importance of behavioral targeting technology in the context of web advertisement. Companies such as Amazon and Google currently use similar technologies to identify user behavior and then offer suggestions or products that might interest users.