Five Reasons to Sell Google

Google (GOOG Quote) CFO Pat Pichette told investors at a Credit Suisse tech conference June 9 that the company is working on "big, complicated problems, building solutions for decades."

The message, while grand, didn't exactly answer a more immediate question among shareholders: How is Google going to get business growing again?

The recession stalled the Internet search industry and handed Google its first ever sequential sales decline last quarter. The cool-down ended a long, prosperous run for the search shop, and it may mark the end of the era of Google's ever-expanding dominance.

That doesn't mean Google won't continue to have the biggest tent in the Internet advertising show, nor will it soon start dismantling its vast Web works. But Google's greatest growth sources are sputtering, and other ventures aren't picking up the slack.

Five reasons to sell Google:

Search volume has slumped. For years, the number of searches has grown dramatically. Now, it's flat.

New users are drying up. Now that everyone "Googles," where are the new searchers coming from?

Market share is flat. Google has 65% of the search business, says comScore, but that hasn't varied much in the past three quarters.

The recession has curbed international growth.

Ad pricing has stopped increasing.

Google booked $21.8 billion in revenue last year, and 97% of that came from Internet ads. Google has mastered the art and science of search ads. It gets paid a portion of money when users click on one of its advertisers' ads, and it also gets paid by the number of impressions or number of times it places ads on Web sites.

Beyond Search

Search ads are a wonderful trick, but it's still only one trick, and Google has not had any breakthrough success in other areas beyond search. YouTube, for example, continues to be a popular service and Google still hasn't found a way to make money from it. By some estimates, Google loses between $200 million to $500 million a year on the video site.