Quote from joeski:
It is human nature to become vindictive when one feels slighted by the unwarranted success of others. Vindictiveness, is, however, a poor investment or trading strategy. Google's success has nothing to do with "javascript webmail" (and I am a "computer scientist" as well, bfd). It has everything to do with having a monopoly on internet ppc advertising.
You have made a good call on the pullback of a high-flyer during an overall downward trend, but I would suggest not letting your hubris lose the money you've made. I'm not saying that the bottom is in for Google, because if the broader market sells off again Google will probably follow (although $500 looked awfully strong last week) then Google will probably follow. But not for the reasons you posit, and if you keep patting yourself on the back for the wrong reasons, your positive feedback loop will bite you eventually.
An anecdote: I started an internet-based services company back in 2001, back when Google was a curiosity and didn't even do pay-per-click (you paid for "impressions"). We quickly discovered that Google was the ONLY way to sell online, and gladly handed over 1/5 of every sale to them ($100 on $500, on average). This was still true when we sold the company a year ago, and I venture to guess it is still true today, and will be for a long time. It was true even when it became obvious in 03 or 04 that their search results were no longer the best because of merciless competition for top organic search results (we had as many people working on our search ranking for top keywords as we had software developers...). The bottom line is, they had, by luck or whatever, developed an unassailable brand - one worth many billions of dollars.
There is some risk that clean energy initiatives and broadband spectrum diversions will be a drag on growth, but until "google" stops being a verb with most internet users, don't expect a collapse, regardless of the disdain you feel for their debatable "innovations."