According to today’s New York Times (nytimes.com), Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, most notably social networking. Investors have criticized the company for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields.

But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric E. Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.

“This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September. Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.

“They’ve done a really good job of positioning themselves so they can’t get boxed out of the market,” Mr. Gillis said. “Now they just need to deliver some innovation. Let’s wring some revenue out of this platform.” But because mobile ads generally sell for less than half the price of Web ads, Mr. Gillis said, “there’s just not a lot of profit left over.” Though Google makes Android software for phones, it does not make money from it directly because it gives it away to phone makers. Meanwhile, Apple makes money from its devices and from what appears on their screens, including its own ad network. “Mobile search is definitely going to surpass desktop search,” said Scott B. Huffman, who works on mobile search at Google and leads its search evaluation team. “The lines will pass, and I think they’ll pass before anyone thought they would.”

Google’s stock price (ticker GOOG) has been under pressure lately, downtrending since mid-January of 2011 and recently gapping down significantly on a poorly received quarterly earnings report. It currently is trading significantly under its’ 200 day moving average at approximately $524 per share, down from its’ 2011 high of nearly $643 per share.