GOOG ducks a question on its conf call (1Q05 conf call quotes)

Google (ticker: GOOG) co-founder and President of Products Larry Page was asked by CIBC analyst Mike Gallant on GOOG's Q1 conference call when it expects its new product initiatives (such as Google News, Froogle and Gmail) to generate signficant amounts of revenue. Mr Page's reply:

I think -- we actually don't think about it exactly that way. And the reason why it's a bit more complicated for us is that many of the products that I mentioned are very well integrated into Google's main search product. For example, when you search for a product and you've got a listing from Froogle, maybe a very large percentage or the majority of people actually get those listings by searching directly on Google and getting a listing through Froogle that's shown on Google at the top using what we call one box.

So I think -- when we think about these products we think about them as improving our core product for our users and also we look at those products as generating a lot of distribution for those products through our core search. And from those metrics I think we're doing very, very well both on improving the user experience and on improving our ability to monetize and get the right information to consumers.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

Quick comments:

1. Yup, but they also function as stand-alone products; and Google could provide data for the stand-alone revenue streams.
2. GOOG's quarterly conference call is wonderful: in one hour it adds almost zero incremental information to that already given out in the company's earnings press release. But all those poor sell-side analysts still have to listen (and be seen to be listening).