Is Google's Search Ad Business Plateauing?

Here's the funny thing about setting out to rule the world: people actually set expect you to deliver. Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld has mapped out Google's revenue growth over the last four quarters, and discovers that growth in the company's organic revenue (that would be its core business, the most important of which is search ads) has steadily declined. In the last year, Schonfeld notes, Google's organic revenue growth has dropped from 57 percent to a paltry 32 percent. That's right, revenue from Google's core business only grew by a third in the last quarter. Now, you may be thinking about how staggering those numbers are, or the fact that Google's profits are ten times Yahoo's. But even when you astonish the world by dominating Internet search in the space of a few years, people tend to expect an encore.