Google: Microsoft is our biggest competitor

Google's main product is search and its main competitor is Microsoft, though Facebook has started to nibble at the company's other ventures.

Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview carried out weeks ago but published on the C-SPAN website on Monday that Google faces competition from the Facebook social network and from specific technologies for mobile devices.

"Today we have one very clear competitor, which is Microsoft. We used to have two, with Yahoo, but Yahoo largely outsourced the search stuff to Microsoft," he said. "We have additional competition from different corners, so Facebook is a competitor for a bunch of properties and also for attention."

Facebook has over 400 million members, of which half access the site every day, according to Facebook.

Beyond search and social, Schmidt expects the competition in mobile technologies to get tougher.

"We're more likely to face new competition — there's lots coming — in these vertical applications that answer questions," he said. "People search differently on mobile phones — in the next year more searches will come off of mobile devices and page views than off PCs and macs — that's a huge, huge change and provides a new competitive front for us."

Google has a number of ventures in providing specific answers to specific questions, such as its