A 4 HOUR Webcast of Google's analyst day is up. CNet mercifully excerpts the highlights for the less devoted google-holics. Hey, even I could only stand to listen to the audio version...

So what do we find? A TON O' STUFF. Highlights with my blather in italics:

Predictable:

• Click fraud "is not a material issue in the company," Schmidt says.
• Worldwide focus. Hiring everywhere to build global engineering. Eustace: Google has a challenge in engineering to distribute the site worldwide. "This is not an outsourcing effort."
• Google not experiencing increased pressure on traffic acquisition costs. Those costs overall have been declining.
• Eustace: Google has built one of the largest computational infrastructures in the world. "The reason that's important is because we are incredibly cheap." Competitors can not deploy infrastructure faster, cheaper or at scale.

  Forget what you read about 100k servers. My fearless prediction: Google has over 1 Million CPUs in its infrastructure TODAY. The skynet datacenter in a shipping container model is real.

  AMD stock was up today on the idea that Google would start using AMD CPUs. That's how many CPUs they buy...

Intriguing:

• Rosenberg: "More can be done with even better personalization" AND LATER: "There's an enormous opportunity in click-through rate improvements."

  Imagine Google AdSense with behavioral data. Relevant ad breakthrough for sites where content is thin, but user profile data is thick. Imagine Google taking on Yahoo in impression based stuff.

  Imagine all the people
  Sharing all the world...
  
  You may say Im a dreamer,
  but Im not the only one,
  

  Oops, sorry, got caught up in the 'imagine' theme...

• The company will focus more resources on the hottest properties. "We understand the impact that 10 million, a hundred million users can have," Schmidt says.

  HOT PROPERTIES implies MySpace? There was a lot of talk about Orkut in this conf call, oddly. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Yardley lately?

• Schmidt pees on Microsoft's parade: Google is primarily focused on Microsoft as a competitor because of the software giant's history as a company, but Google hasn't seen an impact from Microsoft's search products yet.
• Schmidt shows a chart of the $283 billion market for advertising, including broadcast, radio, Internet, print, cable TV and direct mail. Says Google will be in all of those markets over time.

  More evidence for the Cringely theory. Google wants to deliver targeted "Minorty Report" experience advertising over anything connected to TCP/IP. Which will be everything in 3 years.

Funny:

• Marissa also gets in MSFT's Grill: Mayer: The fact that AOL chose to go with Google rather than Microsoft (as a search partner) indicates AOL thinks Google is better.

  She prefaced this with: "Google tries not to get too focused on external competition". Right Marissa. Eric just told us that Microsoft was the primary focus. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

• Kaifu Lee's speeches to university students in China have been extrememly popular. There's even been some scalping of tickets.

  I'm picturing Lee on the stage opening the show: "Are you ready to ROCK, Guangdong-province!?!

• CFO Reyes: "The biggest issue in the fourth quarter was all around the tax rate. That's an important item and Google is focused on it, but that's not an operating item. It was a very solid quarter."

  Translation: It was a good quarter, but we've lost $40B in market cap since then due primarily to my inability to predict the tax rate and keep my mouth shut.

• Clapping as Reyes was introduced.

  I wonder who the audience was - short sellers?

Overall, great stuff. I'm sticking with my Google more dominant in 2006 prediction. Of course I also said the stock would go to $600 by the end of the year. Maybe that's why I'm so harsh on Reyes - he's screwing up my Nostramdus prize eligibility.

¶ 3/02/2006