Without revealing figures, Schmidt said in an interview this week that the privately owned company achieved a net profit in its last quarter and has turned an operating profit for each of its past two quarters, making it one of the few profitable high-profile dot.coms. Google is now expanding its operations, with plans for new offices in London, Germany and Japan.
Unlike other search engines Google refuses to allow search results to be distorted by companies paying to appear high up in listings, nor does it clutter its home page with banner ads. Similarly it clearly identifies advertisements in search results by labelling them “sponsored links” so that users will not be confused by the relevancy of search results.
Additional revenue comes from search services licensed to other sites. It now acts as the search engine for the Yahoo! portal and provides search services for corporate intranets, with corporate customers paying per search. Among its clients is Cisco, which has an intranet comprising 53 million pages.
Google is widely regarded as the internet’s best search engine and leads the competition with its index of almost 1.4 billion web pages. It remains privately owned, so is under no obligation to publicly announce its profits. Market analysts estimate that turnover this year will be about $50 million.