Lessons from Google pre earnings call hype:

– It’s very difficult to use comScore data to build financial models. Wotta surprise; that’s not what they’re built for. But you’d think comScore would realize that there is such thing as bad PR.

– At the risk of sounding like a suckup sycophant, you modelers out there might want to pay attention when management tells you they’re reducing bad clicks to make the good ones more effective. And expensive.

– Google says it doesn’t feel any looming recession pain. Okay, but Int’l grew way faster than the US. I remain unconvinced that Internet advertising is recession-proof.

– Google babbled something about having display ad capability on 90% of its pages, and becoming the biggest display platform in the world. But then it quickly backed down and said it had no real plans for anything other than YouTube and Orkut.

– Bloggers have no shame. You didn’t know that? Quoting Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider: “Google met revenue estimates and blew away EPS. Some hair on the quarter, but obviously miles from the disaster some had feared.” “Some,” Henry? Some??

Okay, I’m being a little unfair — earlier today SAI predicted GOOG would beat consensus estimates. But, still, SAI’s been one of the bigger fear-mongers that I read anyway…

– From the Journal: “Like other technology giants Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp., Google also reported strong growth in revenues abroad, potentially easing concerns that the slowdown in the U.S. is spreading world-wide and helping make the case that big tech companies may be well positioned to weather a domestic recession.”

IBM is a services company and sells what is essentially capital equipment (computers used to be counter-cyclical — 15 years ago — but no more), Intel is a near-monopoly that sells components, mostly to PC companies, and Google makes its money off of advertising. Why does the performance of these three companies indicate anything whatsoever for a mythical “tech sector?”