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| Web superstar Google eyes public offering
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 (AFP) - Google, the private firm with the dominant Internet search engine, is considering a public share offering next year that could catapult the firm into the ranks of the Internet giants, published reports said Friday. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times said the company, which has become one of the hottest properties on the Internet, contacted more than a dozen investment banks earlier this month about possibly selling shares to the public in early 2004. BizVantage – Serious & personalized business, investment and technology intelligence for a serious advantage. The plan, according to the reports would be to sell shares to the public in a massive online auction, a move that could sharply cut underwriting costs and bypass the traditional Wall Street process for initial public offerings, or IPOs. Google spokesman David Krane declined to comment on the reports. People familiar with the talks say investment bankers have estimated Google's value at 15 billion to 25 billion dollars. Such a move would provide a big injection of capital and catapult Google to the ranks of the giants of the Internet, creating a firm with the market value around the level of Amazon.com (22 billion dollars) or Yahoo (26 billion). Google has already become a household word on the Internet and changed the vocabulary of the Internet, inspiring Web users to "Google" people, places or things to get information. The plain-looking Google.com site, a simple search site devoid of the crowded pages of web portals like Yahoo or MSN, is the worldwide leader for Internet searches, according to research firm comScore Media Metrix. Google.com is used for 33 percent of searches in English, but that figure could be much higher, as Google is also used for the underlying searches by Yahoo and others. Some estimates suggest as much as 75 percent of all search-engine-generated traffic to websites comes from Google, from everything from research to phone numbers to news articles. Although Google does not disclose financial information, its profits are growing rapidly and are reckoned to be running at an annual rate of about 150 million dollars on revenues of 500 million, the Financial Times said. The company has in addition to its general search page, a news archive search and a shopping comparison search engine known as Froogle. A significant revenue source is its so-called paid search engine, which allows advertisers to list their sites in results when users search for something. Google was founded by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin just as the Internet was coming into prominence. Unable to interest the major portals like Yahoo in their search technology, the pair decided to start their own company. The search engine, which uses a complex mathematical formula to analyze Web pages and the relevance to a search request, has become the cornerstone of the Internet, with some 200 million searches daily in 88 languages. Some Web operators try to use that system to improve their placement on searches, although Google keeps its formula a tight secret. The founders came up with name the Google, a play on the word googol, which refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. "A googol is a very large number," the company says on its site. "There isn't a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web." bur-rl/ceh US-Internet-Google
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