I’ve been following stories about Google’s finances for a while now, including all those crazy predictions for a US$600 share price by end 2006 (The Economist, amongst others, Alternative coverage). Today, Google lost $20bn in value. It’s not so much the value that’s of interest, but the single-product business model Google seems to have been following for so long -

“Virtually all Google’s revenue comes from sales of web search-related advertising.”

To break out of this, sounds like they’re going to be diversifying all over the place, mostly to new markets they’ve never been in before -

“On a conference call to discuss results, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said that the company plans to invest significantly its capital spending this year, with most of it focused on servers, networking equipment and data centers, as well as real estate.

“We are going to invest for the long term and make some really big bets,” Schmidt said on the call. “

This doesn’t sound particularly smart to me. Libraries - do you have backups of everything you own on Google Book Search? Not that Google will cease to exist, but that I think there may be more changes to their core business, the search engine, than we’ve seen before.

On a related note, Yahoo! Australia is now Yahoo!7 in a strategic deal with the Channel 7 Network [Note: PDF] and has become unusable.