Focus Time for Google

Another stellar quarter for Google(GOOG Quote - Cramer on GOOG - Stock Picks) may amount to yet another lackluster one for its shareholders.

On Thursday, the company reported first-quarter results that handily beat analysts' expectations.

But for Google, an upside earnings surprise is no surprise at all. This quarter, it topped consensus forecasts for earnings per share by 11.5%. But it had beat estimates by roughly 8% for the two prior quarters and by about 12% for the quarter before that.

And while the stock rose slightly in afternoon trading on Friday -- shares were up 2.6% to $483.93 -- Google is still nowhere near the ever-expanding price target analysts seem to be placing on it. Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto upgraded the stock on Friday and raised his price target to $620. Noto was among a legion of sell-side analysts issuing bullish research notes about Google on Friday.

Despite Friday's gains, Google's stock price is not much higher than it was in at the start of 2006, when it first traded north of $470. And though Google has turned its search ad business into a well-oiled money machine, it seems that investors have almost grown used to it. Investors are treating its constant, incremental innovation almost as though it's a company in the much more mature semiconductor or disk-drive industries, where impressive gains are the norm.

Sell-side analyst targets can be arbitrary, but Google's performance over the quarter was still impressive, says Adam Gold, an analyst at Entrust Capital. "Some people say that Google's reliance on search ads makes it a one-trick pony," says Gold. "But it's more like a stallion."

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