As seen on The May Report.

* Pretty close to a transcript of the first part of my conversation with Gian Fulgoni of comScore on April 23rd:

Hey, the guy has a sense of humor. I told him my birthday was April 15th, tax day -- how appropriate. Gian said it could have been April 1st. :-)

"Google does not give much guidance and is very closed mouthed," he said. The street, he said, "is in a situation where they are desperate for any information they can get on Google's performance."

"Here's how we get dragged into this," he said.

"We issue data on the search market. Google's revenue fundamentally comes from two metrics: one is how many paid clicks there are and another is the price paid per click.

How many times are they getting paid and what are they getting paid when they get paid.

You have to be cognizant of whether one is talking about the U.S. or the globe. Google is a global company.

So, we provide regular reports on the total number of search queries being conducted and we do that domestically and globally.

If one wanted to know the total number of searches that are being conducted, those data are readily available."

But if you were to ask what about paid clicks. "First of all, we only provide U.S. data at the moment. We're not providing global paid click data and that is the whole issue here."

"By the way, nobody else provides any paid click data."

I asked Gian if there is a technical problem in gathering that data.

He said, "It is really, really a challenge. There are a lot of technical underpinnings which I would have to go into."

"Nobody else does it anyway, so you can imagine the attention that those paid click data get. We sell the paid click numbers to clients including Wall Street analysts."

"The Wall Street analysts are allowed to include those paid click numbers in their reports. We don't provide the paid click data to the media."

"What started happening around the beginning of the year is that Google's paid click numbers started dropping [in the U.S. because that is the only place they have numbers for] but unfortunately some analysts either did not realize that or chose to ignore it and drew conclusions on Google's global performance on the basis of what was going on in the U.S. and that was the big mistake because the trends are clearly very different between the U.S. and the rest of the world."

"This gets kind of amusing in a sense. So, when analysts started putting out these negative reports, the media started picking up on it and suddenly everybody's talking about Google may be having a problem."

"What was underneath it all was conclusions being drawn on the basis of our U.S. data and that being applied to the world which you can't do."

"A lot of times the trends that are going on in the world are not what is going on in the U.S."

I asked if there was a high correlation between the general search data and the paid click data.

Gian said simply "no."

"Total search queries are continuing to climb sharply, but the paid clicks for Google were dropping..."

"As it turned out, it was really being driven by Google's efforts to make the end user experience better. So they were trying to eliminate unnecessary clicks even though it might cost them something, they were clearly hoping that they could cause the price paid per click to increase and they have been successful at it."

"They get paid more money per click, but clearly by trying to make the end user experience better, one of the results is that you can cause the number of clicks to drop because the users are getting back the search results that are right and relevant to them are not going to have to click on as many links."

This is a good place to cut our discussion for today. The next part of the conversation gets a bit more technical.

The chart Gian sent me is here and it shows the correlation between Google's U.S. revenue and comScore's paid click data.

The correlation is not exact between the two because all U.S. income does not come from paid clicks. Tomorrow, I will have the rest of the conversation with Gian.