Interesting article at Online Media Daily today about how Google views their prospects if the U.S. economy goes into a recession. Author Tameka Kee quotes Alan Eustace, Google's Senior 

relatively young company, Google hasn't yet experienced a true recession - and that the market would have to, in a sense, "wait and see" what future performance would look like."

Google's stock price has been falling since both they and comScore reported that clicks on Google ads declined in the 4th quarter of 2007. Eustace said the drop stemmed from two things the company did on purpose; instituted algorithmic improvements on the ad-serving end and reduced clickable space in AdSense ads (used by domainers).  Eustace said "we made choices to reduce the number of advertisers and decrease accidental clicks, because the changes deliver better information to users and make them click more in the long run." Eustace claimed that while clicks had decreased, advertiser conversion rates were much higher.
(Posted March 4, 2008)