Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular Internet search site, will make fewer acquisitions and slow hiring amid the global economic turmoil, Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said.

The slowdown means more advertising budgets are ``under stress'' and Google is being ``more careful,'' Schmidt said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York.

Google's profit growth slowed to its lowest level this year last quarter as some advertisers, including home and auto lenders, cut back on ad space to reduce costs. Shrinking ad budgets have hurt newspapers the most, Schmidt said.

``All of us are vulnerable,'' he said. ``It's a race between a contraction in advertising, which would affect everybody, and a very positive shift from offline to online.''

The shares have fallen 45 percent this year on investors' concern that a weakening global economy will hurt ad sales. Google, based in Mountain View, California, climbed $6.78, or 1.8 percent, to $379.32 at 4 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Google, which handles almost two-thirds of U.S. Internet searches, has spent more than $3.38 billion in the past 12 months on acquisitions such as DoubleClick Inc. to extend its lead over Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The company's dominance pushed Microsoft to make an unsolicited offer for Yahoo in January, a bid that fell though in May.

A global credit crunch may cost the online-ad business $6.7 billion in lost sales through 2010, according to Collins Stewart Plc. Borrowing costs surged after at least 15 banks failed this year, hurt by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.

Earnings Performance

Profit rose 26 percent to $1.35 billion, or $4.24 a share, in the third quarter, Google said last week. Excluding costs such as stock-based compensation, profit was $4.92, beating the $4.75 average analyst estimate, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Google has no plans to cut back employee perks, such as gourmet cafeterias, Schmidt told reporters today. The company will keep spending on data centers in preparation for more ``cloud computing'' products, he said. Cloud computing lets users store information on the Internet and access it from any computer.

``We're in a massive shift from how we're doing computing,'' Schmidt said.

Web search queries on mobile-phones are growing at a rate ``quite a bit higher'' than Google's overall expansion, Schmidt said. The company's Android operating system allows developers to create programs for mobile phones. T-Mobile USA Inc., a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, will release the first Android-powered phone, the G1, on Oct. 22 in the U.S.

Newspaper Revenue

The economic slowdown may mean U.S. Internet ad spending growth is less than 20 percent next year, a rate not seen since 2002, Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart in San Francisco, said last week.

Selling ads for online news sites is also proving to be problematic, because readers spend an average of 22 minutes reading the print product versus an average four minutes spent on a newspaper's Web site, Aggarwal said.

Schmidt said he doesn't know what newspapers should do about rising newsprint costs and the loss of advertising revenue.

Schmidt endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama today, and said the candidate could run Google.

``He's a pretty smart guy,'' said Schmidt, who reiterated that Google as a company is neutral in the election. ``I'm sure he could learn how to do it.''

Schmidt also called for greater transparency from the U.S. government, saying it should publish an itemized budget every year. Washington is ``dysfunctional,'' he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amy Thomson in New York at Athomson6@bloomberg.net; Greg Miles in New York at gmiles1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 20, 2008 20:18 EDT