In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, eight United States lawmakers convey their sentiments and pose questions regarding Google’s upcoming privacy policy changes. The following is some of what was said in that letter:

“Google’s announcement raises questions about whether consumers can opt out of the new data sharing system either globally or on a product-by-product basis.”

“We believe that consumers should have the ability to opt out of data collection when they are not comfortable with a company’s terms of service and that the ability to exercise that choice should be simple and straightforward.”

“While Google suggests that the purpose of this shift in policy is to make the consumer experience simpler, we want to make sure it does not make protecting consumer privacy more complicated.”

Further questions revolved around users who decided to delete their accounts with Google and if their information would be retained or deleted. There are about twenty questions in total about the new Google privacy policies.

The lawmakers have requested a response from Google and would like it to be before February 16th.

In the midst of Google’s announcement about their results for the 2011 fiscal year, they nonchalantly dropped a pretty juicy piece of info concerning their social networking site:

“Google had a really strong quarter ending a great year. Full year revenue was up 29%, and our quarterly revenue blew past the $10 billion mark for the first time,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “I am super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail, and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago. By building a meaningful relationship with our users through Google+ we will create amazing experiences across our services. I’m very excited about what we can do in 2012 – there are tremendous opportunities to help users and grow our business.”

Did you see what Larry Page did there? “Google+ now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago.” In three months, Google grew over 200% and is, I think we can officially say, booming. Page included a transcription of his remarks on his Google+ page, where another interesting bit of fact was shared:

I’m also pleased to announce that there are over 90M Google+ users — well over double what I announced just a quarter ago on our earnings call. Engagement on + is also growing tremendously. I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: +users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly.

Yup. Definitely booming.

Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, remarked upon the “stunning statistics” from Page’s talk:

On behalf of the Google+ team, I wanted to thank you for using Google+. Four months ago, when we opened to the public, we were not sure what kind of reception we would receive. Your feedback has helped us build this service, and we can’t thank you enough for your enthusiastic support.

We deeply believe in the power of people. Google can be about pages and people, about information and individuals.

This past quarter we began to simplify the Google experience. Gmail, Android, Chrome, Search, Ads, and YouTube are in the early stages of having deep support for your identity and your relationships. Expect us to deliver something truly beautiful. We’ve only just begun to work on that promise.

Other items of note from Page’s talk:

Say what you want about the ubiquity of Facebook in our lives or the mystique that shrouds the “cult” of Apple/Mac, but Google is stirring so many pots – and very deftly, at that – that they appear to be on track win 2012 and it’s only January. Throw in the fact that as early as next year the sale of Android devices very may well eclipse PCs and you’ll start to believe that, in a few years, these “fiscal earning reports” will simply be called the State of the Union Address by the President of the United States of Google.

The most well-known of Page’s new products is Google+, a social networking endeavor that aims to chip away at the Goliath that is Facebook. Google+ now boasts over 62 million users and adds over half a million per day. They aim for 400 million by the end of 2012.

Another product Larry Page birthed at Google is Google Offers, which challenges Groupon, the time-sensitive commercial deal-of-the-day king. Google had attempted to buy Groupon outright, but was rebuffed. Google Offers is developing at pace, with deals offered in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Portland, and fifteen other deal sites currently. More will be offered to other cities in the future as Google Offers shifts to challenge Groupon.

Page founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin. Page was CEO at the company’s initial launch, but they later hired Eric Schmidt to serve in that position. Page’s return to the CEO spot has streamlined how Google operates. No more must all three power-sharers at Google (Page/Brin/Schmidt) sign off on a project before it green-lights. Page’s leaner/meaner approach allows Google to brings products to users quickly.

One of the biggest – and most controversial – moves Page made in the past year was to begin acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the cellphone arm of Motorola, for $12.5 billion. That deal is so big that it is under review by the U.S. Department of Justice to determine how it could affect the overall mobile communications market in terms of anti-trust. The primary goal of the deal seems to be for Google to have many Motorola patents in its hands so as to avoid any legal issues in its future plans. Google’s current hardware partners like Samsung and HTC don’t appear to be concerned about the deal.

2012 sees Page and Google preparing to broaden the reach of Google+, finalize the Motorola deal, and launch an Android tablet to challenge the iPad.

In recognition of his 2011 accomplishments, Investor’s Business Daily has named Page its 2011 CEO Of the Year. Previous winners include Netflicks’ Reed Hastings (2010), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (2009), Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt (2006), and a man that many thought should have won again this year, the late Steve Jobs (2007). IBD’s bypassing of Jobs in favor of Page has set off a flurry of thumbs-down comments from pundits.

Here’s what Bill Gates had to say.

Google CEO Larry Page said the following on Google+:

I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me. He was very kind to reach out to me as I became CEO of Google and spend time offering his advice and knowledge even though he was not at all well. My thoughts and Google’s are with his family and the whole Apple family.

Apple has of course released its own statement, as has the Jobs family, who says we can expect a site to be set up to express condolences.

In the meantime, people are also doing so at Famousdead.com.

The chart, which comes courtesy of The Understatement, is concise and awfully revealing. Not only that, but it begs another question, if Google’s leaders aren’t using it, why on earth would normal folks want to switch over? You’ll notice Randi Zuckerberg, even though she’s moved on from her brother’s creation, still uses Facebook. A great deal, in fact.

So why don’t the majority of Google’s management team not use Google+? Obviously, unless you’re hearing it from the horse’s mouth, speculation reigns. But after you look at the chart in question, it does make one wonder:

2. “The board/top management shouldn’t be expected to use Google+”
Yes, they should – maybe not every member extensively, but not even a single post by a single non-executive member of the board? Can you imagine Fred Wilson not publicly using the major new product of one of his companies?

3. “Steve Jobs was really active on Ping?”
Ok, fair enough. But a music social network isn’t even remotely fundamental to Apple’s future whereas clearly Google thinks Google+ is central to its future.

With that in mind, would Google+’s future be brighter if Schmidt, Page and Brin posted more? I’m not so sure that’s accurate either. That being said, seeing a higher level of interest from the group that dominates search would probably only help their social networking venture.

As Google pays an enormous $500 million fine for allowing Canadian pharmacies to place ads through AdWords, targeting consumers int he US (as announced by the Department of Justice last week), it appears that Google CEO Larry Page may be narrowly avoiding criminal prosecution.

According to the Wall Street Journal, prosecutors claim to have found emails and documents indicating that Google CEO Larry Page “was aware of the allegedly illicit ad sales.” The publication quotes:

“Larry Page knew what was going on,” Peter Neronha, the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney who led the probe, said in an interview. “We know it from the investigation. We simply know it from the documents we reviewed, witnesses that we interviewed, that Larry Page knew what was going on.”

Mr. Neronha didn’t say when the Justice Department believes Mr. Page learned of the matter, though people familiar with the investigation allege it was several years ago. He declined to discuss the content of the emails, citing grand jury secrecy.

That part about not saying whether the DoJ believe Page knew is a key factor. Unsurprisingly, Google isn’t talking about it, with a spokesperson quoted as saying, “We have settled and we are moving on.”

According to the WSJ, Neronha said there aren’t any plans to prosecute Page, but that “they weren’t off limits.”

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576532692988751366.html#ixzz1WQjDJu7a

Meanwhile, in another angle to this story, Candian Drug Company Jan Drugs, which claims to have been an advertiser involved in the issue at hand has shared with WebProNews a letter from its president to Google, which I’ll simply include here in its entirety:

Dear Google,

David Janeson and the Jan Drugs team

A lot of people think the fine is unreasonably high as well. It is one of the largest such forfeitures ever in the US, but the DoJ says it “represents the gross revenue received by Google as a result of Canadian pharmacies advertising through Google’s AdWords program, plus gross revenue made by Canadian pharmacies from their sales to U.S. consumers.”

Surprisingly, Google hasn’t posted anything to its Public Policy blog since the DoJ’s announcement.

On the call, he dropped a few stats:

• Over 10 million people are on Google+ officially.
• Google+ is getting a billion items shared and received in a single day
• The +1 Button is being served 2.3 billion times a day
• Android is getting 550,000 phones activated a day (he said “phones” not devices, but not certain whether or not that includes tablets)
• 160 million Chrome users

He didn’t talk about search a whole lot, but he did bring up the fact that they’re now including author images in search results, indicating the emphasis the company is putting on “who you are” in search results. This also doesn’t make HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson’s approach of sub-domaining authors to dig out of the Panda hole seem too far-fetched.

Page said he views the company’s products as falling into three categories:

1. Search and ads products – core driver of revenue for the company

2. Products employing high consumer success – YouTube, Android, and Chrome. “We are investing in these for the long term,” he said.

3. New products – Google+, Commerce, and Local . He said Google is “investing to drive innovation and adoption,” in these areas.

“Overall we’re focused on long-term, absolute profit and growth,” he added, reiterating a point he recently made in that “speculative” projects like driverless cars are not something the company is “betting the farm on,” though they might have a few going on at any given time.

“We’re only at 1% of what’s possible,” said Page.

In the earrings report, the company revealed that its headcount (as of the end of June) was 28,768, up from 22,316 at the end of March.

“We will optimize head count for the long-term,” he said. “We’re probably ahead of where we need to be with headcount growth.”

The FairSearch Coalition, the organization made up mainly of travel sites (including Microsoft’s Bing), gave WebProNews the following statement:

“The members of FairSearch.org are encouraged by reports that the FTC is preparing to launch a broad antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices. Google engages in anti-competitive behavior across many vertical categories of search that harms consumers by restricting the ability of other companies to compete to put the best products and services in front of Internet users, who should be allowed to pick winners and losers online, not Google. The result of Google’s anti-competitive practices is to curb innovation and investment in new technologies by other companies. These anti-competitive practices include scraping and using other companies’ content without their permission, deceptive display of search results, manipulation of search results to favor Google’s products, and the acquisition of competitive threats to Google’s dominance. Google’s practices are deserving of full-scale investigations by U.S. antitrust authorities, and are already the subject of reviews by the European Commission, and the Texas Attorney General.”

Bloomberg put out a report indicating that Google may get subpoenaed by the Senat Antitrust Subcommittee, as it seeks testimony from either CEO Larry Page or former CEO and current Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt about the company’s business operations. According to the report, which quotes letters and emails from the subcommittee and Google, Google only wants to provide its Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who it has deemed “the executive who can best answer their questions”. Drummond also serves as SVP of corporate development at Google.

They don’t want Drummond, however. They want Page or Schmidt. It’s interesting that the company is allegedly resisting offering one of these two.

From Drummond’s official bio:

David Drummond joined Google in 2002, initially as vice president of corporate development. Today as senior vice president and chief legal officer, he leads Google’s global teams for legal, government relations, corporate development (M&A and investment projects) and new business development (strategic partnerships and licensing opportunities).

David was first introduced to Google in 1998 as a partner in the corporate transactions group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, one of the nation’s leading law firms representing technology businesses. He served as Google’s first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial rounds of financing. During his tenure at Wilson Sonsini, David worked with a wide variety of technology companies to help them manage complex transactions such as mergers, acquisitions and initial public offerings.

Either way, it would appear that the company is really in for some major scrutiny, between this and the FTC ordeal, which Bloomberg has said may take years to complete. The company is also undergoing regulatory scrutiny from the Department of Justice with relation to its proposed acquisition of AdMeld, an ad optimization company.

The DoJ had no problem approving the company’s acquisition of ITA Software, however, which was the catalyst to the formation of the FairSearch Coalition to begin with, though the organization continues to pursue continued obstacles for Google’s search dominance, and the DoJ didn’t let that ITA deal go by without some stipulations.

The company’s stock has not been doing so great since Page took over as CEO, with investors worrying that Google is spending too much on things that might not pay off. According to Mercury News, Google’s stock has dropped nearly as much as $100 per share since the transition in leadership.

Page highlighted the company’s success with Android, Chrome, and Display Advertising. He reportedly put up a picture of Google’s famous self-driving cars, saying shareholders shouldn’t read press reports about things like that and assume a large amount of the company’s resources are being poured into them.

He’s quoted as saying, “It’s much more interesting [for the media and people outside of the company] — what is the latest crazy thing that Google did. It tends to be like three people in the company, keep that in mind. We are not betting the farm on a lot of those things. That’s not what we are doing.”

Page stressed that the company is still focusing on search and advertising, Google’s real breadwinners. “We don’t want to choke innovation,” he added. “We want to make sure we have a lot of things going on at the company that are maybe speculative…we spend the vast majority of our resources on our core businesses, which are search and advertising. … That’s our core focus.”

In October, Google announced:

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History.

This followed a lot of media criticism about Google’s continued ability to innovate, and numerous reports of top engineers choosing Facebook as an employer over Google.

As recently as last month, Google was found to be “quietly lobbying” for proposed legislation in Nevada that would legalize self-driving cars on public roads. According to the New York Times, Google had hired a Las Vegas-based lobbyist to promote the legislation, which would allow the licensing and operation of the cars while also allowing texting behind the wheel of a self-driving car. 

Self-driving cars aside, Google has recently unveiled some other ambitious endeavors, not the least of which being Google Wallet – the company’s vision for mobile payments. At Google I/O, the company’s developer conference held last month, the company discussed Android @ Home and the Open Accessory Projects, which would see everyday appliances getting integrated with the company’s mobile operating system. Google also unveiled Google Music, and the new Chromebooks, based on its innovative operating system strategy – Chrome OS.

This week, Google officially launched Google Offers, which is a little more in line with the more traditional money makers like search and advertising. Then of course there’s the +1 button, which is even more directly tied to search and advertising.

Obviously search is still integral to Google’s existence, and a very big part of what the company is known for. Google certainly still commands the majority of web searches, though Bing is doing everything it can to try and catch up.

Google also has many other products outside of the search realm that it continues to place a great deal of focus on (though search is usually related to these in one way or another. Think Google Apps. Android. Chrome. They’re even going outside the norm of non-TV advertising (other than that famous Super Bowl Spot in 2010), and unleashing new Chrome ads during prime time. Not search. A web browser.

According to a report from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, “search” has even been eliminated as a product group internally, since co-founder Larry Page took the CEO reins. The group is now called the “knowledge group.”

“Google confirms the change,” writes Arrington. And, they point out, it was actually publicly announced in an SEC filing made on April 11. Nobody seems to have noticed that someone was named the SVP of a Google product group that previously hadn’t existed.”

For many people, Google is simply about search. If they want to search for something, they “Google it”. Google has always stated its goal clearly though. Let’s look at the classic mission statement:

Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Search was Google’s starting point, and has proven to be a good one, but it is not the entire end game. As time goes by, old technologies and platforms evolve, and new technologies and platforms emerge and are acquired, it becomes clearer that organizing the world’s information is about much more than just search, though search remains a very important part of it.

Google has greatly emphasized the importance of mobile to its corporate strategy in recent months. Mobile in fact opens doors that were simply closed before the advancements in smartphones and tablets. Location is obviously one of those doors, and that’s where a great deal of the company’s focus is these days (only one of many – it’s a pretty big company, obviously).

The whole thing adds another interesting angle to the Google vs. Bing debate. How much of Google’s time and resources will be dedicated to enhancing its flagship search engine by the time Bing catches up (if it does) in market share, in comparison to other related, but different technologies Google is focusing on? Microsoft gets to play catch up in smartphones/tablets too.

Do you consider Google a search company? Let us know in the comments.