Google sees green shoots

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 29 Jun 2009 at 07:52

The worst of the financial crisis has passed and it is "reasonable to be optimistic for 2010," believes Google boss, Eric Schmidt.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in southern France, Schmidt said US jobless claims indicated "the beginning of the bottom."

"The rate of jobless claims is decreasing although the absolute number is increasing," he explained.

Although keen to comment on the state of the economy, he was less forthcoming on Google's search business.

Schmidt said he did not want to speak about reports Google had set up a team of engineers to study the technical specifications of Bing, the search engine launched recently by Google rival Microsoft, as he had not seen it.

"Bing is a competitor. We have absolutely looked at Bing; we have actually studied what they do as Microsoft studied what Google does," he added.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has been winning market share from its rivals but is still trailing Google and Yahoo.