The web is good at echoing the early consensus. When Google results were summarized as a "sevenfold increase in profits" a lot of places picked that tidbit up, including blogs of analysts who you'd think would put a little more critical analysis into the problem.

That "sevenfold" impressiveness is a classic lie with stastics - it's a comparison against one quarter in 2004, and a charge of $201M was made in that quarter to pay off a lawsuit on the Overture patents. In other words, 2004's results were depressed by the one-time charge, which is now making 2005's results look amazing. Without the charge, Google's profits were up around 33% from the same quarter last year.

But when I searched for [sevenfold profits] on Google, I was surprised at the many other companies who have reported such a sizable comparitive increase over some random time period:

• Chrysler
• RedHat
• MedTech
• Microsoft
• Cascades Inc.

If you replicate that search, you may notice that a lot of the citations are from day trader type stock pushers hyping some stock you never heard of, and its recent "sevenfold increase"

¶ 10/29/2005