Since Google's ad revenue is in direct proportion to the popularity of its search engine, any significant drop in usage would materially impact Google's finances. "Google's fortunes could change dramatically overnight," said industry analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.
Google's list of non-search endeavors is long and Google often shows signs of struggling to provide proper maintenance and development for these services.
For example, in June Internet consumer advocacy group Stopbadware.org reported that Google was one of the world's top five networks responsible for hosting "badware" sites, mostly due to scammers and online criminals abusing the company's Blogger blog hosting and publishing service.
At the time, Robert Hansen, CEO of SecTheory.org, a Web security consultancy, told IDG News Service: "The security community has known about Google's problems for at least a year or two now, and unfortunately Google has not responded with anything other than hand waving."
This year, security vendor MessageLabs reported spammers abusing Google's Picasa Web Album photo management site and its Docs suite of hosted software in schemes to lure people to spam and malware sites.
"Google has been very slow at reacting to this type of abuse after being alerted," said Matt Sergeant, a senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs.
Other companies that provide free hosting services for photos, documents and the like tend to be much more responsive. "Most of them deal with these abuses in a much more timely manner," Sergeant said. "It appears there isn't enough effort being put into addressing these problems by Google."
Asked to comment, a Google spokesman e-mailed: "We expect spammers to use every means possible to try to send spam. That's why we have a very robust spam-fighting effort at Google. We disable these accounts immediately and will continue to do so."
Enderle isn't sold on Google's spin. "They are ultimately responsible and it does tarnish their brand, makes it increasingly so people don't trust them. Microsoft had a similar problem with security coming into this decade and they got one hell of a wake-up call. Google is probably looking at a future in which they get a similar wake-up call," he said.
In addition to dealing with spam abuse, Google is on the receiving end, on a daily basis, of thousands of complaints, requests and questions from the users of these and the many other consumer online services it provides, like Gmail, GTalk instant messenger, Calendar, Reader RSS manager, Orkut social network, Knol online encyclopedia, Checkout online payment system, Notebook online bookmark, Lively virtual world, iGoogle personal home and the Chrome browser, to mention some.
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