By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

GOOSE CREEK -- Google Inc. established itself as the world’s most popular search engine through lightening fast returns on user’s queries, but when it comes to building and staffing its new data center in Berkeley County, the company is not moving as quickly as anticipated.

Last Spring Google officials had anticipated that its new data center in the Mt. Holly Commerce Park in Berkeley County would be completed and partially staffed by December.

But a company spokesman on Tuesday afternoon said it’s now likely that preliminary testing of equipment in Google’s new building won’t start until March of next year, and that the facility likely won’t be online until the next summer at the earliest.

“The construction process is always fluid,” said Matt Dunne, a contract spokesman that Google hired to field questions about its data center construction activity throughout the country. “We are anticipating being able to do limited testing by the end of the first quarter of 2008, and will then focus on becoming fully operational by the second half of the year.”

Dunne also indicated that while the Mountain View, Calif.-based has “lots of great resumes in the queue,” it’s still yet to hire a management team for the Berkeley County site.

“Google, as you can imagine, has a very extensive hiring process,” Dunne said, declining to get into details. “No one is currently on the ground in Berkeley County.”

When it was suggested that construction of the new Google facility was falling behind schedule, Dunne would concede only that the schedule had “slipped a very small amount.”

“Certainly there’s not much of a deviation from the end of this year and the end of the first quarter of next year,” he said. “We still feel good about the construction process. When you’re working on a very large construction project, it’s inevitable that timelines move. And we feel good that we will do limited testing in the first quarter of next year.”

Dunne said a number of factors led to the change in timetable, including advances in server technology since construction of the new data center began.

“Google is a company that’s always looking for ways to improve its overall operation,” he said. “One of the ways we do that is to create more efficient servers that use less electricity compared to the amount of energy they put out.

“Google is committed to pursuing innovation on the hardware side, which makes our data centers very proprietary,” Dunne continued. “We’re always looking for ways to make them better and safer.”

The progress on Google’s Berkeley County site is in marked contrast to published reports of its progress in developing a similar data center in Lenior, North Carolina.

According to the News & Observer in Raleigh, Google has announced that start of construction of a second facility on its campus there, a development the paper described as being “ahead of schedule,” but a welcome development for local leaders who were criticized for the size of incentives offered to the company.

On Oct. 1, in fact, representatives of Google and Dell Computers, which has a manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem, participated in a lengthy conference call exploring the possibility of pooling their human resources efforts there.

Dunne described the conversation as “very preliminary,” but said it would not likely impact hiring for the Berkeley County site. He also said Google has not had similar conversations with companies in the Charleston area.

Google has maintained that once completed the Berkeley County site will employ about 200 people.

Asked how many people might be employed when the limited testing of equipment begins early next year, Dunne said, “We don’t give out those kinds of specifics.”

“I would say we’ll have a chuck of the total we’ll need when the facility is fully operational,” he said.