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Google Inc. (GOOG)
Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript - Q&A Session
January 22, 2009 6:00 p.m. ET

Executives

Krista Bessinger - Director of Investor Relations
Patrick Pichette – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Jonathan Rosenberg – Senior Vice President, Product Management

Analysts

Jeetil Patel - Deutsche Bank
Mark May - Needham & Company
Jeffrey Lindsay - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Jim Friedland - Cowen & Company
Youssef Squali - Jefferies & Company
Marianne Wolk - Susquehanna Financial Group
Sandeep Aggarwal - Collins Stewart
Gene Munster - Piper Jaffray & Co.
Ross Sandler - RBC Capital Markets
Steve Weinstein - Pacific Crest
Mark Mahaney - Citigroup
Jason Helfstein - Oppenheimer & Company
Rob Sanderson - Broadpoint AmTech
Imran Khan - JPMorgan
George Askew - Stifel Nicolaus & Co.
William Morrison - ThinkEquity
Sameet Sinha - JMP Securities
Ben Schachter - UBS

Presentation

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Google Inc. conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Krista Bessinger, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead ma''am.

Krista Bessinger

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to today''s fourth quarter 2008 earnings follow-up conference call. With us are Patrick Pichette, Chief Financial Officer; and Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management.

After we cover some housekeeping items, we''ll open the call immediately to your questions. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Also, please note that this call is being webcast from our Investor Relations website located at investor.google.com. Please refer to our website for important information including our earnings press release and the latest slide deck. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours.

Please note that we routinely post important information on our Investor Relations website located at investor.google.com and we encourage you to make use of that resource. As a reminder, the purpose of this follow-up call is to give participants the opportunity to ask more detailed financial and product questions in an efficient and Reg FD compliant manner.

Let me now quickly cover the Safe Harbor. Some of the statements we make today may be considered forward-looking and these statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation and we undertake no obligation to provide or publicly release the results of any revision to the forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.

Please refer to our SEC filings including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30th, 2008, as well as our earnings press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our result. Copies can be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website.

Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call, such as EPS, net income, operating margin, operating income, and our effective tax rates are expressed on a non-GAAP basis, have been adjusted to exclude charges related to stock-based compensation. We also have adjusted our net cash provided by operating activity to remove capital expenditures, which we refer to as free cash flow. Our GAAP results and GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations can be found in our earnings press release.

With that, we''re ready to take your questions. Operator?

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. The question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically today. If you would like to ask a question you may do so by pressing the “*” key followed by the digit “1” on your touchtone telephone. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute button is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Once again, it’s “*1” for questions and we’ll pause for just a moment to assemble the roster. And we''ll take our first question from Jeetil Patel from Deutsche Bank.

Jeetil Patel - Deutsche Bank