Internet search king Google Inc plans to tighten its belt amid slowing revenue growth, cutting back on spending and new projects, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
“We have to behave as though we don’t know” what’s going to happen, the newspaper quoted Google chief executive Eric Schmidt as saying.
The Internet giant will curtail the “dark matter,” Schmidt said of projects that “haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting.”
Schmidt told the Journal that Google is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore.
“When the cycle comes back,” he said, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”
The newspaper report came as Trip Chowdhry, an analyst for Global Equities Research, said he expected Google to post revenue of US$15.71 billion this year, US$15.23 billion next year and US$14.57 billion in 2010.
“Our research indicates that the challenging macro-economic conditions continue to worsen Google’s advertising driven consumer Internet business,” Chowdhry said.
The Journal said online advertisements connected to Internet searches still accounted for 97 percent of Google’s revenue but products such as Google Checkout, a Web payment service, and Google TV Ads, which sells television advertising time, haven’t generated significant revenue.
Last month, Google announced it was ending its virtual world experiment, Lively, at the end of this month as part of a bid to “prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.”
It also cancelled experimental search results Web site SearchMash. Google has also been looking for new revenue opportunities.
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