WALL Street’s love affair with Google suffered a setback last night as shares in the once- unstoppable internet search engine company sustained a record fall and it admitted that British operations had failed to live up to expectations.

Google shares fell 15 per cent to $367.77 in after-hours trading on Wall Street, the biggest one-day loss since Google came to market in 2004.

Google missed its Wall Street profits forecast for the fourth quarter of the year by a mile, while sales at its British division missed their target in the last three months of the year, with the Christmas period particularly bad in the UK.

Britain is Google’s biggest advertising market outside the United States and its decline is a blow for the Silicon Valley-based company. British operations contributed 14 per cent of revenue in the fourth quarter, down from 15 per cent during the three months to September.

Google Shares plunged erratically in volatile trading after the market closed in New York last night, even though profits across the group for the fourth quarter rose 82 per cent to $372.2 million, or $1.22 per diluted share, from the same period a year before on sales up 86 per cent to $1.92 billion. Wall Street analysts had expected the company to make profits of as much as $1.77 a share.

George Reyes, the chief financial officer, told analysts that the company had been hit with a much higher tax bill than it had forecast in the fourth quarter.

Shares in Napster, the music subscription service, surged more than 44 per cent yesterday after reports that it may become the target of a takeover bid from Google. However, a spokesman for Google said yesterday: “We are not in talks with Napster and we have no current plans to launch an online music service.”

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