2007 Roundup: Google marches forward

Search giant continues to expand

You know your company is having a good year when its first-quarter profits top $1bn. And that's exactly how Google kicked off 2007, by pulling in revenues of $3.66bn for the quarter ending in March.

While we may have joked back in April 2006 that Google could afford to pay $1bn to advertise on the lunar surface, in 2007 that was definitely true.

And in a way the company is doing something similar by putting up a total of $30m towards the Google Lunar X Prize to encourage international teams to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon. Well, the company has already mapped the stars.

While Google can obviously afford a few frivolous activities, it didn't take its business eye off the ball in 2007. Its most audacious move came at the expense of its biggest rival: Microsoft.

Microsoft was known to be in talks to buy ad tracking firm DoubleClick, valuing the company at $2bn.

The buyout would have given Microsoft access to DoubleClick's Dart technology, which monitors how internet adverts perform, boosting Redmond's ability to fight Google for online advertising market share.

A brilliant plan, except for the part where Google sneaked in and bought DoubleClick for itself.

The deal is naturally being i nvestigated by the Federal Trade Commission over competition worries following complaints from Microsoft.

Germany is also questioning the buyout over user privacy fears, putting the $3.1bn deal under threat.

Even if the DoubleClick deal does eventually come unstuck, Google has plenty of irons in plenty of other fires.

For starters there's the rumoured Google phone, a device that became much more likely when the company applied for a patent.

What Google eventually released was a mobile software platform called 'Android' that should have applications running on it by the second half of 2008.

Google claims that Android, which is still generally referred to as the Google Phone, will use its open mobile platform to end fragmentation in the industry.

It doesn't stop at phones, though, and in June Google created a version of its Desktop software for Linux and in November brought its Gadgets to Mac OS X.

The company also entered the social networking space by releasing a set of open APIs that lets developers simultaneously craft applications for multiple social networks.

MySpace, Bebo and Xing, which are all under fire from 2007's big grower Facebook, backed the Google OpenSocial technology.

Google also increased its user base in 2007 by unveiling a small business search, bringing its Checkout online payment system to the UK and adding StarOffice to its Google Pack of downloads.

The firm launched Google Apps Premier Edition for business, modified its rack-mounted Google Mini search appliance for small businesses and is rumoured to be about to offer 50GB of free web storage.

The search giant also invited all European users onto its Gmail service for the first time. But Gmail proved that, no matter how big your company, it can still be defeated by a much smaller firm.

German businessman Daniel Giersch, who owns the Gmail.de website, won a court case that stopped Google using the Gmail name in Europe.

While some companies would shrug off such an event, and be happy sitting on an enormous pile of laurels, Google continues to look for new challenges. So what does the future hold?

Well, the search giant is increasingly looking to turn itself into a full-scale internet company with its own capacity to offer services.

Google made an official bid to take part in the upcoming Federal Communications Commission auction of wireless bandwidth.

Not that the spectrum bid should be a surprise. Google had reportedly been in talks to build its own infrastructure by laying fibre cable across the Pacific.

Still, with all that activity and its increasing hold on the market, Google does have its humble moments.

Rather than wandering around telling everyone how much the company knows about the web, internet guru and Google employee Vint Cerf was happy to admit that that the social effects of the web are still unclear.

"It takes decades, if not generations, to fully understand the impact of such inventions," he said.