CNBC has a good, balanced article on Google's earnings report, to be announced after the close today. Some key quotes:

Google and the experts following the company do seem to agree there is some kind of slowdown afoot; what the market has to digest is how severe it is, and what exactly is causing it. Remember that last quarter on the earnings call, CEO Eric Schmidt was clear in saying that the company was seeing no signs of an economic slowdown, no signs of recession. For a company that doesn't offer any meaningful guidance, analysts will be listening extremely closely to the comments on the conference call today to see if that position has changed any. If Google sees signs of a macro-economic slowdown, that could be bad news not just for Google, but for Yahoo, Amazon and others. Citigroup's tells me "there's a very clear bogey laid out there. We're going to see whether they'll repeat those exact words this quarter, or start fading away from them."

These shares are off better than 30 percent this quarter, so it's clear traders aren't expecting much. For the longer term investor, however, with Google closing the DoubleClick deal on the quarter, increasing its market share in search, Yahoo and Microsoft distracted by the hostile takeover and no real competitor offering any challenge to Google, slowdown or not, Google looks very attractive at these levels. If you're patient, and can stomach the short term vagaries.

It might be a good idea to see what the quarterly report says and consider buying more stock in the weeks after earnings. However, if you do not intend to hold this stock for the next 5-10 years, it may not be worthwhile to buy. A good comparison with Google is Yahoo. Back in the 90s, Yahoo enjoyed the same fanatical following that Google has now. They were the entryway to the internet, a portal through which you could find websites in the new World Wide Web. They also had a gimick search algorithm-- pages were searched by humans. Google has a similar algorithm, while it uses technology, humans are still behind it as it puts links with the most linkbacks in the top of the search. [The basics: A Web page is a bunch of media such as images and text and links that, when you click them, open up a new Web page. If a Web page has a lot of links to it from other pages (called linkbacks), it will become more popular when people search its contents on Google.]

Yahoo's IPO was in April of 1996 and it shot up fast, splitting multiple times in the next 5 years until the tech bubble burst. I think we are seeing the same thing with Google now. In another 5 years, or maybe less, new technology may come up and take over. There are already rumors that if Facebook offers an IPO, it will become the new darling of Wall Street, mainly because it is the new thing with so much promise (Wall Street likes growth companies, especially when they are new and unproven). With so much going for it, I don't think this is the end of Google. I think that it is in the beginning stages of it's run up.

Sources:
1. With Google's Earnings, Investors Need to Be Patient
2. Yahoo IPO closes at $33 after $43 peak