Google gave an inside peek into how web search works today, revealing some fascinating numbers in the process.

Search starts, of course, with crawling and indexing, and Google says that the web now has 30 trillion unique individual pages. That up an astonishing 30 times in five years: Google reported in 2008 that the web had just one trillion pages.

Google says that it stores information about those 30 trillion pages in the Google Index, which is now at 100 million gigabytes. That’s about a thousand terabytes, and you’d need over three million 32GB USB thumb drives to store all that data.

When you search, Google tries to figure out not just what you’re typing into the box, but what you mean. So algorithms for spelling, autocompletion, synonyms, and query understanding jump into action. When Google thinks it knows what you want, it pulls results from those 30 trillion pages and 100 million gigabytes, but it doesn’t just give you what it finds.

First, a ranking procedure uses over 200 closely guarded secret factors that look at the freshness of the results, quality of the website, age of the domain, safety and appropriateness of the content, and user context like location, prior searches, Google+ history and connections, and much more.

Then, in just over an eighth of a second, Google then delivers the results to your computer, tablet, or phone.

To test how well its searches are actually performing, Google also uses real-live humans: search evaluators. Forty thousand times a year, Google’s search testers check results, see what’s working, and provide suggestions on how to improve.

And what about web spam?

Web spam is useless pages that are crafted to rank well on Google, draw your attention and clicks, and then monetize your eyeballs or clicks off to somewhere else. Google said that it notifies sites that it considers them spam, or that they have been hacked, at a rate of 40,000-60,000 per month.

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

“We’re still in the early stages,” Page said on Google’s fourth-quarter 2012 earnings call. “We’re still at 1 percent of where we should be.”

Knowledge Graph is Google’s attempt to provide answers beyond simple keywords and queries. Answers, for instance, that an intelligent person or entity might provide and that demonstrate some degree of understanding of the concepts behind the questions.

In order to do that, Google has assembled a massive and growing “semantic network” of at least 570 million objects and 18 billion facts about and relationships between them, from sources such as the CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia, and Freebase, an entity graph of “people, places, and things” that is built the same way Wikipedia is: by interested volunteers.

Those facts about things like “Lamborghini Countach,” “bike,” or “cat” — and the connections between them =– are what Google hopes to use to improve search results and make searching more natural, similar in some ways to how Wolfram Alpha and Siri work, at least in their limited contexts. Ultimately, the Star Trek experience would be nice: simply asking computers natural questions.

That’s critical for Google, as Page acknowledged in a rare well-duh moment, saying that ”getting people correct answers is really important for our business.” But he also laid a finger on one of Google’s biggest challenges with Knowledge Graph: internationalization, saying that it was “hard work.”

However, if humanity ever develops something that approaches artificial intelligence, it’ll probably be from something like Google Knowledge Graph. Perhaps when Page and team are at something like 75 percent.

photo credit: Google

At least, that’s what Chris Winfield believes. He’s the cofounder and chief marketing officer of BlueGlass Interactive, a digital marketing agency with Fortune 1000 clients such as Disney, eBay, and the NFL.

I chatted with him today about Facebook, Graph Search, and Google.

VentureBeat: Let’s start generally: What was your first reaction to Graph Search?

Winfield: For me, one of the most interesting things was the way they announced Graph Search. It was understated, there was no livestream, no partnership with CNN, and it wasn’t in a huge venue. They’re really under-promising, saying it’s not a search engine, it’s not Yelp, and we’d love to work with Google if they want to.

To me, that’s a bigger sign that they are in fact looking to compete in search.

But Facebook has a partnership with Microsoft, and you can bet they’ve really looked at how hard its been for anyone to compete with Google. They’ve watched Microsoft pour billions into search and barely make a dent.

VentureBeat: So how would they compete?

Winfield: To start, all they want to do is get people comfortable with making some searches on Facebook … starting to get something they can’t get anywhere else.

The most important thing for Facebook is they just have to get people comformtable with finding a couple of things, and then what we’ll start to see is the evolution of it as they build it out. One goal will be to get more and more businesses to stop caring so much about Google Local.

And then, over time, search and being able to control that experience will become fundamental to Facebook and especially to their advertising platform.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about Facebook and advertising. How does this help?

Winfield: Everything for Facebook ads right now is based on guesses about what you’re interested in, but search became the most effective advertising engine of all time because people are directly looking for something … you see the intent.

That said, the holy grail is personalization: The more the platform knows about you — what you’re looking for, and what you’re likely to not just click on but also take some kind of action about — the better. Which is why Google has not just focused on being the best search engine but [has] added the personalization that is so important.

Now, from the Facebook point of view, if an advertiser can bid on terms related to your business — and friends have liked that business — that’s the Holy Grail. There’s a long way to go, but if you can put intent and what you like and who you are together, that is very, very powerful.

VentureBeat: Where’s the biggest conflict?

Winfield: Initially, they’re going to position this as if there are no conflicts — we’re completely different, we’re solving the people search problem.

But they’re almost trying to change how people think about search. Googling something is obvious and standard now — Google has it locked up. But when Facebook is talking about natural language search and changing how search is done socially, that’s key.

In my experience, as soon as someone says we’re not really competing with you, that’s when you get really scared. For example, TripAdvisor — you have this partnership and you think you’re safe — but now that’s at risk. Or Bing, frankly. There’s no way that partnership lasts very long. As soon as Facebook thinks they have something that works better, it’s gone.

Facebook doesn’t need to come in and be the dominant search site. They just need to start chipping away.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about the advertising potential here.

Winfield: That plays back to Facebook’s whole overall messaging: We know we have the audience, we know that advertisers want to spend more with us, and we know they’re not spending as much as they want to because they’re not seeing the same results as elsewhere (like AdWords).

Facebook doesn’t really need to convince advertisers, they just need to create the product and get people using it. And then they’ll have advertisers lining up around the block.

VentureBeat: Is this perhaps the first really serious challenge for Google?

Winfield: Yes, because Facebook has over a billion users. And it’s not just like a Yahoo home page with a billion visitors; these people actually have accounts and are actually logging in.

So Facebook has the opportunity to grab those people’s attention – that’s what makes this different.

VentureBeat: What should Google do?

Winfield: Really, Google should just keep doing what they’re doing.

The big question for Google is: How do you incentivize people more, or give people reasons to spend more time with Google? It’s not about being the next Facebook, it’s about trying to control more and more of people’s experience. Which is why Google is integrating everything.

For Google, it’s about how they convince people that they have the best search engine. If you’re able to find what you’re looking for and are finding what you need, you won’t leave.

photo credit: Tom.Bricker via photopin cc

Facebook released its Graph Search today, but sadly, this is only available in beta, and the public won’t have access to it for some time. We got some 1-on-1 time with the search to show you just what you can look forward to.

Search is easy and unobtrusive. The bar sits hidden at the top of your Facebook page in a big, blue bar. When you are on your news feed page, the bar will say, “Search for people, places and things” in opaque text. When you’re on your page, or a friends page, the name of that person’s profile will appear in the blue bar. You’re still able to click it and immediately start typing your query.

When you start typing your questions, Facebook will suggest search queries and clean up your question. You might ask, “Which of my friends like The White House?” and it will simplify and suggest “My friends who like The White House.”

The search could be most useful for situations like finding friends in a specific city you plan on visiting or finding people who like a band you’ve got an extra ticket to see. You can also use it to search for things “nearby.” If you’re looking for friends who live near your current location, you can look for “friends nearby.” If you need a hospital, you should call 911, but you could also search on Facebook, and it shows you the hospitals in your area  (while you’re bleeding out, of course).

I really like the feature that lets you look at all the pictures you’ve previously commented on, or previously liked. It helps recall old memories, or locate photos you may want to disappear.

The unfortunate part is that you can’t search for queries such as “Which of my friends are selling tickets in San Francisco?” or “Which friends are sick?” For example, the app Help, I Have the Flu searches your Facebook feed for posts that include the words “sneezes,” “flu,” or “coughs.” It’ll happily send a message out to your friends letting them know to send you soup because you’re stuck in Tissue Town.

Zuckerberg said that the engineers have lot of feature that they want to include in the next release, including indexing more data on Facebook. Perhaps that means we’ll be able to search status content some day.

The web search function isn’t that bad, but I don’t see people using it very often. Whether you’re a Bing lover or not, the web search function feels more like a supplement to the Graph Search in the last case scenario where you’re not able to get what you need from Facebook’s results. Browsers today come with easily accessible search bars too, making it an unnecessary step to open Facebook to grab a quick bit of information not specific to your friends circle. Of course, Facebook acknowledged that this wasn’t meant to be a web search product, and said the partnership with Bing was not exclusive.

If you do, however, want to access web search, you can, well, search for it and click on the web search icon. Facebook’s search can still be used for traditional queries such as finding a friend or brand profile.

Facebook announced its ambitious new Graph Search this morning, but even more intriguing to me was a slightly minor side-announcement: The company is also relying on Microsoft’s Bing for web searches within Facebook.

Bing already integrated Facebook into its social search function last year, so it makes sense that Facebook looked to Microsoft when it needed a search partner. The deal can be traced back to Microsoft’s strategic $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007, which has led to a close relationship between the two companies. With Google as a common enemy, Facebook and Microsoft need to show a united front when it comes to search and social.

But try as Microsoft might, Bing still holds only 16.3 percent of the U.S. search market, compared to Google’s 66.7 percent, according to the most recent data from Comscore. Bing has also powered Yahoo’s search in the U.S. since 2010, and it’s on track to completely replace Yahoo’s search globally.

By putting Bing right within Facebook, Microsoft will have access to searches from the social networks’ more than 1 billion users. And perhaps the best thing for Microsoft is that most of those users likely won’t even realize they’re making a Bing search. Without Bing’s stigma holding it back (many consumers may still find a Microsoft search engine “uncool”), it will likely end up generating a significant amount of search traffic via Facebook.

One journalist at today’s event asked if Facebook had considered a similar search deal with Google. Everyone in the room, including Zuckerberg, erupted into laughter. Zuckerberg later added that he would love to work with Google — but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Ask.com and app discovery engine Quixey have signed a deal that will see explicit app search capabilities embedded within a major search engine for the first time.

No, it’s no Google, and not even a Yahoo, but Ask.com still gets three percent of U.S.-based query volume, and had almost 150 million unique visitors in October 2012, according to Compete.com.

Which makes it about 100-150 Quoras.

Quixey indexes Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry apps not just by their title and description, but by everything that is said about them online. That makes Quixey’s results much more relevant, according to Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan.

“With apps we’ve taken a step forward in terms of functionality,” Kagan told me yesterday, “but a step back in terms of discoverability.”

Starting at 5PM today on Ask.com, app-related searches will automatically include apps in the primary search results. Alternatively, users who wish to restrict the search results to apps only, can simply click the Apps tab:

This is Quixey’s biggest integration to date, having previously integrated with companies such as Skyfire and Appthority.

The company is a B to B to C play, meaning that it does not provide services directly to consumers, but simply works through other consumer-facing companies. In fact, while Quixey has a website that demonstrates app search, there is not a single employee in the company whose responsibility it is to maintain that page, Kagan said.

The integration means that searching for apps will be a whole lot easier — and better, Kagan says.

“Often an app is a better result than a web page,” Kagan told me. “For example, if I want to find the best hikes in my area.”

From Ask.com’s perspective, adding app search rounds out its results, and opens new doors. For example, queries such as “watch Toy Story” will now include links to Netflix and Hulu, where users can actually watch the entire movie.

“Apps are gateways to some of the most top-notch digital content out there, so this integration fits perfectly with where our product is headed, especially when it comes to mobile devices,” Ask COO  Shane McGilloway said in a statement.

photo credit: schnaars via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Have you just upgraded to Windows 8 and can’t find that elusive “G spot”? Google’s got some help for you at getyourgoogleback.com.

Windows 8 upgraders may find that Microsoft has gone to some lengths to make Bing and Internet Explorer the default, obvious, and standard web search and browsing apps. (Shocking, I know.) Now, to the tune of “Oh, baby, give me one more chance,” Google is helping you make it “a little more familiar.”

In other words, a little more Google.

In two minutes, Google guides you through downloading and installing its new Google search app for Windows 8 — which includes voice search — and its Chrome browser. Then, the video says, “Your Google is back.”

The version of Chrome has been tweaked for Windows 8, Google says, with “some customizations to optimize for touchscreens, including larger buttons and the cpability to keep Chrome open next to your other favorite apps.”

Cheekily, Google suggests that the search app go right under the Start menu, where it is most visible and obvious.

The Bing search app has been criticized for being attractive but annoying. Specifically, it opens search results in a new Internet Explorer window, which then renders the browser’s back button useless, as the search results are back in the Bing app.

Image credit: Google

Disavow links. It sounds like something you’d say in a Dungeons and Dragons game: “I cast disavow links, rolling my d20 to do a Search check.”

In reality, however, it’s a way for search engines and webmasters to seek out and destroy spam sites, and Google just launched its own disavow links tool today.

Incoming links to your website from a spam site can have disastrous effects on your ranking with the Google Gods.

What the disavow links tool does is simple. As Google puts it on the tool’s page, “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.” This is generally only something you’d use if you have received a notification about manual spam action taken due to spam links directing folks to your site.

The search giant’s Webmaster Tools will send these notifications if your site is linked to through paid links or other nefarious, spammy means and schemes. You can then upload a file of the bad links to Google for the remission of SEO sins.

Here’s our good pal Matt Cutts, who’s like, a level 19 battle sorcerer when it comes to spam-fighting, explaining more about the disavow links tool:

Interested parties can get more info from the Google Webmaster Central blog.

Google’s search engine chief Amit Singhal dreams of a day when, like Captain Kirk, you can just ask your computer a question and get a complex, detailed answer.

One step in that direction: Google is starting to roll out its new Knowledge Graph globally. Google announced Knowledge Graph a while ago; it treats your search queries as whole entities rather than just strings of letters, and it serves much better results in a much prettier interface that “normal” Google search.

For most of us, these changes aren’t that big of a deal; this is just the latest in a long string of incremental changes that Google is making to its search technology. Still, any time a giant like Google shifts its center of gravity a little, it has the potential to throw a big part of the world off balance.

Another big part of Google web search becoming more universal is a few feature: Search results can now include your Gmail messages and multimedia. You can sign up now to get early access. If you like Google Search Plus Your World, you’ll likely find this new feature quite useful as well. Also, this latest Google search field trial will include personalized, enhanced flight-tracking features, so you can more quickly see you’re going to be stuck in Newark for a few hours.

I spent some time with Singhal today as part of a press event where Google showed off its latest updates. He and I have something in common: We are united in our deep love for Star Trek. Specifically, we both want to bring the fascinating technologies of science fiction (and Star Trek in particular) to reality. The Enterprise computer operated on a deep understanding of human meaning, not a human understanding of machine-friendly keywords.

“To build the search engine I dream of, we need to make it truly universal,” Singhal says, “so you can do things that are not possible today.”

To that end, the company is also announcing voice-based search for iOS devices. Your searches are verbal and use natural language, and the app talks back to you, giving you verbal results in (more or less) natural language. It’s a lot like the Android voice search features the company showed off at Google I/O a couple months ago.

What Google is showing off today are a few baby steps, Singhal said, but they’re steps toward previously impossible goals like speech recognition, natural language processing, and true artificial intelligence.

Singhal says we’re not there yet, but just before his talk started, he, Google search guru Matt Cutts, and I were reminiscing about the “good” old days of AltaVista, Lycos, InfoSeek, and HotBot. My first real job involved doing search work at a startup in early 1999; Google wasn’t really a thing at that point, certainly not in sleepy central Virginia. And the search process pre-Google was excruciating, slow, and wildly unrepresentative of the web that existed at the time.

Those reminiscences stand in sharp contrast both to the future Singhal is envisioning and to the present state of web search. Over the past 13 years, we’ve come a lot closer Singhal’s goal of intelligent, human-friendly search, and we’re all excited about where search will go next.

Jack Menzel is one of the Googlers working on making the search engine smarter.

“We can use our understanding of the world to help you with more complicated tasks,” he says. He tells an anecdote about a road trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to Cedar Point, an amusement park in Ohio. Menzel needed some convincing to get in the car for such a long trip, and he puled up a Google search for “Cedar Point” to illustrate his point. In old-school web search, you’d see a list of links for the amusement park; you’d have to click through and copy/paste the names of rides into new searches to get more information on each one. But with Google’s new Knowledge Graph, the search engine’s newest “brain” rolled out a couple months ago, Google returns a map, contact information, specific rides in the park, images and videos, and a lot more — all on the first page of results, all arranged in pretty carousels, scannable boxes, and other information design elements infinitely better for humans than a list of links.

It’s not quite the Enterprise computer, but it’s getting closer. As Menzel told me during the Knowledge Graph launch, “Computers don’t really understand what people are talking about. To a computer, it’s just a string of letters.” Knowledge Graph treats queries as objects rather than strings, and it’s one of Google’s attempts to get closer to human-friendly, artificially intelligent search.

The other big part of Google’s web search evolution is speed. “Do you remember how slow it used to be?” Cutts muses. The Internet was slower, and our connections were slower 13 years ago. We’ve all been accelerating on every front, but Google has an institutional preference for lightning speed. It’s pushing and shoving the web to speed-focused standards, superspeedy Internet, speed-tweaked programming languages. Google is like a stupid teenager with his first car, with only one question on his mind: “How fast can this thing go?”

The bigger the dataset gets and the more we turn to Google for web search, the more urgent the need for speed becomes. Right now, the web has around 30 trillion unique URLs. Google crawls 20 billion pages every day, and we humans use Google to conduct 100 billion searches every month.

That kind of activity requires speed on every level of hardware, software, and even design. Today’s announcements, from the Gmail addition to search to the vocal search app, are all engineered to avoid wasting a millisecond more of your time, to get your head out of your devices, to make partaking in life simpler, to free up your brain for solving bigger problems than finding a movie tonight or finding an email you got last week.

“I dreamt all those dreams as a child,” Singhal says. “Thanks to all the wonderful research and the engineers at Google, we are so much closer to my dream of building the Star Trek computer.”

We know that Google’s still a business, and its primary goal is getting more users, selling more advertising, and making more money. But if it can move us a few more inches closer to Star Trek in that process, that’s okay with me.

Image courtesy of alpahspirit, Shutterstock

The company has been involved in an ongoing antitrust probe from the FTC since at least June 2011. This inquiry was intended to “examine fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search advertising business.”

Now, companies like Twitter have raised concerns that Google’s new search results, which integrate and highlight content from Google+, may give the company an unfair advantage that hurts consumers.

Twitter, which has its general counsel looking into the issue, says that Twitter-specific search terms are no longer giving users Twitter-specific search results because of the Google+ integration.

A Twitter representative wrote to VentureBeat in an email, “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet… News breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Bloomberg reports today that two anonymous sources confirm the FTC probe has broadened beyond search ads to include Google+.

Google is also under an ongoing antitrust investigation in Europe. Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently visited Brussels to meet with European Commissioner Joaquín Almunia about the inquiry.

“We frequently meet with policy makers and regulators around the world. We’re always happy to discuss issues affecting our industry and explain how our business works,” the company said in an official statement at that time.

But we’re sure the company is mighty proud of today’s numbers released by comScore that show Bing’s market share has, for the first time ever, surpassed Yahoo’s search market share.

For the month of November 2011, Yahoo grabbed 15.1 percent of the U.S. search market for home and work locations, while Bing took home 15 percent of that pie.

However, for the month of December 2011, comScore says Bing scraped ahead with 15.1 percent market share while Yahoo search dropped to 14.5 percent of the market.

Of course, the big winner here is still Google, which took 65.4 percent of the U.S. home and work search market in November 2011 and actually grew to 65.9 percent the following month.

Numbers from other sources this time last year had Bing pegged as a much more formidable opponent in the search space. In Feburary 2011, Hitwise said that Bing had gained around 27 percent of the search market.

comScore stats from the summer of 2011 show Yahoo at 16.1 percent and Bing at 14.4 percent.

Yahoo web search has been powered by Bing since the two companies struck a 10-year deal to that effect back in 2009. In combining their powers, Microsoft and Yahoo hoped to wedge Google out of complete search dominance.

At that time, Google controlled 65.8 percent of the search market, again according to comScore — just nine tenths of a percent less than it claims today.

In a word, Microsoft’s “win” over Yahoo today is but cold comfort, since their powerful partnership hasn’t managed to budge Google from its highly favorable position.

But with Google’s new inclusion of social results in its web search, change-averse users may run to the hills — or, as it were, to Bing. On the other hand, the change could prove extremely positive for Google. The more interesting numbers are still to come, so stay tuned in for more news of the search wars.

Then this post is for you. We’re going to take you through the steps of turning off Google+ results in your web searches. We’re also going to show you how to turn them back on, in case you change your mind.

First, open up your normal Google.com search page. Go ahead and search for something. If you’re a Google+ user and you’re logged in, you might see something like this:

All those colorful arrows are pointing to the Google+ search results that you so detest — the personal profiles, the Google+ posts, the links shared on G+, and even images posted to Google+.

Here’s how you get rid of them.

See that two-button toggle switch at the top right side of the search results? The two buttons that look like a silhouetted Lego man and a picture of Earth?

If you’re seeing Google+ results in your web search, the Lego man button will be shaded. Click on the Earth button.

Google+ social search results will be turned off. You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled web searches — no socially shared links, no long-winded Google+ posts, no pictures of your neighbor’s kids, just the pure and simple web links you’ve come to expect from Google.

If you change your mind later and decide to give Google+ search results a second shot, just click the Lego man icon.

That’s it. One click on one of two buttons. You don’t have to muddle around in your personal profile settings or look up some obscure Help page. You don’t have to sign a petition. Just point and click.

Aren’t you glad Google made it easy?

That trick right there will turn off personal results for your current search session. If you want to turn off personal search indefinitely, click the gear in the top right corner of the search results page, select “Search settings,” and in the “Search plus Your World” section, select “Do not use personal results.”

Also, you can eliminate personal results by logging out of Google services, in which case you’ll only see general web search results.

Finally, the best way to ensure you never see anything Google+-related in your Google web searches is to not have a Google+ account in the first place. Works like a charm.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Updated

There’s no doubt that Google and Web search have had a huge impact on the economy, but how can you quantify that? Google’s chief economist Hal Varian took a stab at it on-stage today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Of course, Varian is probably a little biased, since he gets a paycheck from Google, but he also had an academic career as an economist at UC Berkeley before going to work for the search giant, so he has some real credentials. And hey, his presentation had a lot of math in it, so it must be accurate … right?

There are three main pieces to Google’s economic impact, Varian said — and he seemed to define that impact beyond Google, so that it includes the Web search and online ad industries that Google has fueled. The first piece is the value of online advertising programs to advertisers and publishers, which is pretty straightforward from a financial standpoint, and which Varian calculated at about $54 billion per year.

Then there’s the value that Web search provides to users. This is harder to calculate, and Varian acknowledged, “I’m going to wave my hands a little bit here.” He pointed to a study where students were asked to find the answers to the same set of factual questions, and on-average the students using Web search found the answers 15 minutes faster than those using library books. The math gets a bit more complicated here, because many of the questions people ask on the Web just wouldn’t have been asked before, but using some other facts as well as something Varian called “the demand curve for questions,” he calculated that Web search saves people 3.75 minutes per day, which at an average wage of $22 per hour is worth $1.37. (Varian said you can also think of it this way: Would you pay about $1 a day to use Google? I would.) Multiplied across the US employed population of 130 million, that saved time is worth $65 billion per year.

For his final piece, which he didn’t bother to discuss, Varian said the value of ad-supported Web applications is $25 billion.

Add it up, and the total economic impact of search and advertising is more than $119 billion. (Varian said the third category overlaps with the first two, so you can’t add it to the total.) There are lots of other factors that Varian said he didn’t add, and the numbers are fuzzy, but even so, he said that when you look at “the value of search, the value of the Internet, of being able to get answers immediately, it’s a pretty big deal.”

Update: An earlier version of this post included a higher total, because I just added Varian’s three numbers together. But he warned TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis against including the third number, since it overlaps with the first two.

[photo by Dean Takahashi]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google included a bombshell in its earnings report today (namely that co-founder Larry Page will replace current chief executive Eric Schmidt), but in addition to the big news the company also shared its earnings numbers as usual — and as usual, they exceeded analyst estimates.

The company said that during its fourth quarter of 2010, its net income increased $2.54 billion, or $7.81 per share, beating estimates of $8.06 per share and up from $1.97 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. Total revenue was $8.44 billion, up 26 percent from the same period last year.

Other noteworthy numbers from the earnings report:

• Google-owned sites generated $5.67 billion, or 67 percent of total revenues
• Google partner sites in the AdSense program generated $2.50 billion, or 30 percent of total revenues
• International revenue was $4.38 billion, 52 percent of the total
• Paid clicks increased 18 percent over the fourth quarter of 2009
• Cost-per-click paid by advertisers on Google ads increased about 5 percent over the same period last year
• As of December 31, Google had $35 billion in cash
• As of December 31, Google had a workforce of 24,400 full-time employees, up from 23,331 at the end of the previous quarter.