Slides, Transcript Of Google Investor Day & Google's 70 Percent Core Time

Didn’t want to listen to the webcast of Google’s
first shareholders day last week? Hey, I tried. But it kept repeatedly dying repeatedly right before the Q&A period! Nevermind. Here come Findory’s Greg Linden and and
BuyGoogle.com to the rescue.

Greg has posted slides shown from the event. Stats and charts galore. I
especially like the 70-20-10 pie chart that I first heard being touted earlier this year at
Google’s first analyst day.

I got some calls from reporters after that asking me to comment on how Google devotes 70 percent of its resources to the core product of search. Search, I asked —
meaning unpaid results? Or search meaning paid and unpaid?

While the chart then clearly showed that 70 percent "core" effort to be labeled "Core:
Search & Ads," it was amazing to me how three or four different reporters I talked with came away thinking it was all search.

So just to stress, that 70 percent core effort is a mix of paid and unpaid — as the latest slides show again. And AdSense contextual ads — which like a parrot I keep
repeating are not search — are nonetheless considered part of the company’s "core"
mission of organizing the world’s information. Got it? Putting banner ads on web sites, which AdSense has
been doing for over a year, is part of the core information organizing missing.

By the way, everyone knows about the famous Google 20 percent time for employees to explore whatever
they want. So where’s that 20 percent slice on the chart? Ah — remember — it’s 20 percent for Google
engineers, not everyone at Google. That’s kind of sad, actually — who says only engineers can be creative or come up with great ideas, if they’re given time to explore.

Greg comments briefly about the investor day slides compared to the analyst day slides here:
Google shareholders meeting. Over at The Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson takes a
closer look at the long tail slide and comments Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave about
addressing working out from the well-served middle (Google’s view) to the extremes at either end. For more on the long tail and search, see my past
Search’s Long Tail post.

Meanwhile from buygoogle.com, there’s a short unofficial transcript of some comments made at
the meeting. Interesting to me is cofounder Sergey Brin saying Google’s strength over Yahoo is technical execution — ie, bringing out technically different and unique
products. In other words, doing what I call pulling a Google, bringing out Google Maps or Gmail and
causing traditional views of a particular service to get rethought.