Google after the bell for 6-27-06: Making money outside of search

Does death really befit Google soon? If you're paying attention to -- and believing -- longtime cable industry executive Leo Hindery, all the major Internet portals are about to be disrupted. They'll be  shaken up by a re-balancing of advertising back to older types of media as well as merger mania between them all. The portals Hindery speaks of: Google, Yahoo!, AOL, eBay and MSN, are about to enter a precarious period.

For one, I guess "portal" really does mean a "gateway to information", since many don't believe eBay is a portal in the strictest Internet sense. With that said today, Google shares closed at $402.32 per share, down $1.90 or 0.47% per share from Monday's close, with just over four million shares trading hands.

So, is Google ready to unleash its PayPal-killer soon? If so, it's going to be tricky, even for Google, to get millions of customers using the new Internet-based transaction and commerce system with eBay's PayPal so firmly entrenched in the sector. I like to highlight this because it seems that although Google has many product offerings that are really, really good (like Gmail), the customers aren't flocking -- yet -- to all these new Google products on the web. Internet search is by far Google's largest Internet product.