The firm has also rolled out Offline Docs using a new browser technology, Google Gears, where you get offline access to your Google Docs. Google Gears lets you run these new web applications even when you are not connected to the Internet. That’s a very big deal.

The managmenet is also very excited about Salesforce.com partnership. Salesforce has integrated its Google Apps products into Salesforce. Now their users have a very seamless, nice access to Google Apps within their Salesforce.com experience.

Key questions and answers from the first quarter fiscal 2008 earnings call conducted by Google Inc. on April 17, 2008.

Ben Schachter (UBS Securities): Could you talk about some of the key initiatives at DoubleClick? What are the areas of integration that you think will be most difficult? Related to that, could you give an update on display and video ads and what types of ads you think are performing better and worse than expected?

Omid Kordestani: We are going through a very complete analysis of all the products and salesforce and service activities. Fundamentally we are looking at maintaining the customer momentum that DoubleClick has had and benefited from. Looking at, in a simple way, how do we get more of the advertising into their network and more of their publishers benefiting from the advertising systems and infrastructure that we are assembling together now. The overall goal is bringing more effectiveness, more accountability more measurements that we’ve been asked for to deliver on. This process in fact was exhaustively reviewed yesterday and there is a strategy in place and you’ll hear of their product announcements in the coming months. From a customer relationship standpoint, on the display side, we are very active in taking advantage of our properties, especially YouTube and the content network to increase the customer engagements.

Jonathan Rosenberg: In terms of display and the type of ads that are doing well, if you think about it from a big picture perspective, we feel we’re in a position to become the world’s largest display ads provider. Over 90% of the daily impressions that we have are eligible for display ads and all of the publishers accept our new format. The gadget and the rich media creative which are served by third parties are all being adopted by folks. The biggest thing that we are seeing that is the concept of an advertiser owning a concept across the entire web and finding their whole audience. Another example is Activision. They use seven Google products to support the launch of the Tony Hawks Proving Ground Game and Search, AFC, the YouTube homepage and the in-video format is working particularly well. They are creating traction on mobile ads.

Justin Post (Merrill Lynch): Could you talk about your display model? Do you see yourself being able to make interesting profitability on network sites or do you plan to put some display advertising on your own websites, which appear to be growing quite rapidly?

Sergey Brin: There are certainly already sites that are Google-owned sites that run display such as YouTube, for example, is a very obviously prominent one. It has a lot of inventory and obviously that’s going beyond traditional display with the in-video ads. There are some other Google properties that might be good fits though we haven’t made clear decisions; Obviously more visual sites like Orkut there is some potential in Google Images but we don’t have any specific plans to announce today in that respect. We are certainly making progress on display in our network also and so I’m optimistic on both fronts.

Jonathan Rosenberg: Now that we have got the DoubleClick acquisition behind us, we will also offer the AdSense sites a media planning tool integrated with Dart for Advertisers by DoubleClick. You’ll see that will substantially increase the lift that we are getting there.

Justin Post (Merrill Lynch): The other cost of revenue growth is about 80%, excluding some of the stock-based compensation. What’s driving that and is that YouTube related at all?

George Reyes: The driver that you are alluding to is basically driven by data center related expenses, the associated depreciation that comes with that and bandwidth costs as well as some DoubleClick amortization.

Doug Anmuth (Lehman Brothers): You mentioned 100 quality improvements were implemented during the quarter. Can you talk about the degree to which you’re already getting the price per click benefit and whether that’s up to your expectations thus far?

Sergey Brin: The 100 search quality improvements I mentioned were to the search quality. I wasn’t referring to the advertising quality experience. But we’ve also made improvements there, of course. If you recall the clickable backgrounds that we eliminated recently, which while they reduced clicks a little bit increased the quality of clicks, and I think our advertisers certainly appreciate that. But there are likewise dozens, if not 100 improvements in advertising quality that we also launched over this quarter. That’s going to benefit advertisers and it’s going to benefit end users who are going to see more relevant, interesting advertising and obviously because those connections can be more fruitful, ultimately that benefits publishers as well.

Mark Mahaney (Citi): Are there enough mobile data points, do you have enough experience particularly in the international markets now to know what the economics of mobile search could like relative to the PC search? Are advertisers willing to pay more or less for that?

Sergey Brin: I don’t have the hard stats in front of me right this very second. I can tell you anecdotally what I’ve seen in the countries and markets where mobile has developed in the sense that devices have high resolution, networks have low latency, the experience works which basically like Japan and a few others that are up and coming, the mobile search and ads work very well. There is certainly nothing to dissuade me that it would be substantially worse than traditional desktop search. I think that if you look in the US and Europe which are a little bit behind those but are progressing, you’ll see increasingly a greater volume and a greater quality of mobile usage and consequently advertising conversion ultimately. Now, you have a significant challenge in mobile in that the screens are much smaller so you just can’t go displaying nearly as much advertising or take as much space. On the other hand, you have much more relevant and timely information like what location the person might be in and so that on balance leaves me quite optimistic.

Mark Mahaney (Citi): The 20% year-over-year growth of paid clicks is obviously much better than feared. Do you think about it terms of trying to get to a paid click growth at a certain anniversarying of these paid click quality improvements whereby that growth will remain in the 20% or low double-digit rate at a more sustainable basis because of these quality improvements?

Eric Schmidt: No. We look at the problem of paid clicks as one of the components of an overall quality improvement. We know that if we can improve aggregate quality we know that the value of a click, number of clicks and so forth will grow, and will grow at whatever the technology will allow. If you look, our absolute growth rate has been very, very significant and we’re very, very optimistic that this model of staying focused on quality will give us not only the strongest ad network but a much broader set of solutions for advertisers and it works well.

James Mitchell (Goldman Sachs): With regard to the user response to Universal Search in non-US territories, have you rolled it out? In particular, why do you think Universal Search can help you gain share in those countries where you are not the market leader and where the incumbent lacks comparable functionality?

Sergey Brin: Universal Search is a very big win from the point of view of the Search experience. Now in some of these international markets like if you look at Korea in fact the local competitors there do have something that’s very much akin to Universal Search. In fact the people’s expectations there are already to have Universal Search results and so its not necessarily something new we are introducing to them there. Our ability to rank and bring in these diverse corpuses that we have will surprise people and they will be impressed by how good it is. In other markets you are right, these additional corpuses and our ability to blend is a substantial distinction and we are going to benefit from that in fact and obviously we have lots of international or foreign language videos and images and so forth and we have a certain number of books as well in there. We are going to benefit from all that hard work that we’ve put in those corpuses.

Imran Khan (JP Morgan): You talked about a monetization improvement for social networking. How you are doing more demographic targeting? Could you comment on what progress you made monetizing social networking compared to Q4?