What are their business plans? This is the question everybody asks when talking about the Santa Clara based search engine, Google. Google is kind of a young search engine as opposed to its rivals who are at least a couple of years older but it has such an amazing popularity among the web surfers that surprises every webmaster. But can the company leverage its popularity to reap long-term profits?

We have all seen a lot of most popular dot-coms gone bankrupt during the past years while they had a large number of visitors. What do you need to prove the [revenue=k*popularity] equation? A good marketing team is all you need.

Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations at Google, told the E-Commerce Times that the company's growth has coincided with the recognition that measurable results are key to attracting advertising dollars online.

Google is getting its revenue from Yahoo!, targeted text ads and selling search appliances but is that all what they can get? Their smart move I personally liked was releasing the beta version of the API through which you can search their billions of web documents in a second and get the result back. Sergi Brin, co-founder and president of technology at Google believes that by releasing the API, they let millions of brightest engineers around the world develop and innovate for Google. Yes, this is true but what's Google really getting out of this?

Google hasn't limited anyone use the search functions, spell checking and many more capalities through the API. Not even sending the AD or other commercial information and you don't have to mention that the search results are provided by Google on your web site. So, is this another point of failure for the dot-com engineers who do not have enough marketing experience?

I believe this could be a great take off point for them by charging the newly launched search engines who use Google API after they get popular and let them deal with the people who want to sell the ads. This way, they will get their revenue without dealing with small businesses, have their popular search engine and get a lot of brilliant ideas from the sharp API fans. In addition to that, they will have total control of in what order display they search results which can be the key to future negotiations.