Google - Stock price falling

Ok so you guys must've seen the news about google stock price falling on the premature earnings release.

Quoted from the wsj article:

"Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, profit fell to $9.03 from $9.72 a share. Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, improved to $11.33 billion.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $10.65 a share"

"Total costs jumped 71%."

"For the third quarter, the average cost that advertisers paid Google per click fell 15% from a year earlier, and fell 3% from the prior quarter."

My question is, how could these analysts have been so far off the mark in their earnings forecasts? In fact so off that the stock price immediately fell after the news was released so clearly this expectation of lower earnings was not priced in.

Wouldn't you think that anyone closely following Google could've found out with a call or some research that the avg cost advertisers paid google had fallen. Couldn't people have found out about the motorola unit dragging down profits for the quarter?

I'm not asking these as rhetorical questions, but I'm wondering what is the barrier to research that could make this such a surprise? After all, analysts should have several months between earnings releases to do research. Is a lot of the information that would be relevant difficult to obtain?