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Google Plans an IPO
Rich Jones writes "According to this story over at the BBC
every geek's favorite search engine is contemplating an IPO. " Hopefully this wouldn't effect the lean mean searching that I've come to love from the unquestioned king of search engines. Now that the hype surrounding IPOs has fizzled, its nice to see a company that looks as good as Google thinking about it.
I use to play it for hours!!
You are welcome!
A private company's growth is a direct function of revenue, profit, and cash position. It's growth is a direct result of it's past successes. An IPO creates an unnatural influx of cash that the company didn't "earn" and doesn't necessarily know what to do with. It permits the company to spend money on things they wouldn't DREAM of spending money on if they were still private. In other words, it permits the company to make decisions and do things that are not necessarily good business.
I dunno about this one. An IPO is just securing a round of funding from a good deal of investors; how is this different from a private company securing a round of funding from venture capitalists?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The visibility trend is not what pleases me, although it would increase volume in an IPO. What pleases me is that large corporate customers are paying to use their engine, and it is continually being reworked to be faster. Once they are profitable, and I would only invest in a token few shares if they IPO before that, I feel that good visibility would help to solidify their value in the eyes of individual investors (are there any of those left?) and fund managers.
;-).
:-). If Google becomes profitable before they IPO, I will *invest* in them. If not, I'll buy a couple shares out of sympathy...
I don't believe that eyeballs translate into money. I worked at NBCi, for god's sake -- I left when I realized that they'd never stop trying to monetize eyeballs (XOOM, which monetized things by actual revenue, is where some of Google's net ops crew came from, while I'm on the topic of failed-portal refugees). The company I now work for cares about profits, profits, and profits -- we only bother keeping hit counts in order to bill for bytes transmitted. So please do understand that I'm with you on this.
I never bought Yahoo stock. I bought Foundry stock, and Merck stock, and bonds, because the value of these instruments is derived from profitable institutions. I suggest that anyone who doesn't understand this stick with either IBM stock or stuffing their cash under a mattress
As for momentum, it bought me a truck during the Great Internet Tulip Craze, so I'm not unhappy about it. I just don't believe in it for the long haul
As of the moment, one of my friends who works there has heard nothing to indicate that this rumor is anything but bullshit, so I'm not losing any sleep yet.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
No company that relies on banner ads for revenue is ever going to be successful again, not even when they provide the value that Google's do (they're cheap, and work pretty well, but that's not a real business model, kids). I'll stand by that prediction -- not too brave of me.
GOOGLE MAKES MONEY LICENSING USE OF THEIR ENGINE.
Yahoo! pays to use it (although they didn't buy access to the entire page index, so a direct Google search will often give better results). So do about 50 other major companies. When I say 'their engine' I mean the many Googleclusters in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and (I believe) Herndon, not just the software.
Some of my friends and ex-coworkers work there -- "Nobody at Google ever quits" they say, and aside from contractors, this appears to be true. It is a wonderful work environment and they have filled their cubicles with Microsoft Research caliber PhD's and ex-professors. They are working on image retrieval technologies (not truly useful yet) and have pretty much cornered the search-engine-ASP market. (In fact, since I last talked to anyone at Google about this, they've added ANOTHER 70 PARTNERS!)
The technology rules -- I have converted every single employee at my current company (far from an IPO, but profitable nonetheless) to using the Google Toolbar because it saves so much time. (and they in turn have converted most of their acquaintances...) If things continue this way, not only will they be an attractive investment, but vast numbers of potential investors may habitually use Google the way they use Microsoft's site. If things go REALLY well, even Microsoft may end up using Google for their search services. That's damn good awareness. And that is why I say...
I STILL HOPE THEY DO NOT IPO YET.
Not just because I doubt my erstwhile coworkers will cut me in for friends-and-family ;-) but because the market is atrocious and I, like (I pray) most /. readers, would want to see them rewarded for superior technology and hard work, rather than having a fair-to-middling IPO due to the .com spectres. If revenues continue to increase (and I believe they will -- Google's search engine is lightyears ahead of new entrants like Teoma due to its already being deployed and well tested), a Google IPO in a year or two would probably be a huge hit, as it may catch the economy coming OUT OF a dip.
Marc, Shawn, Chris, and everyone else at Google, you're doing a great job, and I will buy into the company's IPO either way. But I hope Doerr and Brin and Page, or whoever would be making the decision, decide to hold off a little bit!
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
There are few people in the world less technical than the BBC web team :0)
(That was a joke. The BBC serve up a non-trivial volume of traffic every day themselves).
It doesn't seem to me that right now is a particularly good time to IPO. So, why would Google do this? Perhaps they're low on money and have been unable to secure financing from investors?
Hopefully this wouldn't effect the lean mean searching that I've come to love from the unquestioned king of search engines.
Actually, I hope that it continues to effect that sort of searching, and that an IPO doesn't affect it negatively....
Some other dead ends:
You get the idea... often a sub-optimal but very well understood approach will be significantly more usefull then a theoretically superior but unworkable approach. With the rate of change of the internet, I don't know how else you could possibly keep up to date.
I am amazed at how good a job Google does every time I search. It's performance and accuracy are nothing short of astounding if you understand the nature and size of the solution space they cover.
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
They totally broke the USENET access engine they purchased from deja.com. Deja was so much better. It allowed expansion by thread, advanced filtering and searching based on the group, personal posting history, marking threads to watch, etc.
Now they're "Google Groups" and they have just recently enabled **trumpets sound** POSTING!
I imagine that article was written by a reporter for the BBC, not by the web team. While I wouldn't have any reason to malign the BBC's web team, the general computer knowledge level of most reporters is a tad on the weak side.
Actually, if memory serves, Google multinode Linux clusters in three different colo facilities for redundancy, one at Exodus in the bay area, one somewhere in Virginia with some other colo provider, and I don't remember where the 3rd was.
So the BBC seems to be thinking 'cluster'='large server' perhaps. Of course we know that isn't quite right, but nontechnical people might not understand the difference.
Since the article indicates that Google is likely to break even by the end of the year and analysts forecast annual revenues of about $50m by 2002, this will put Google in a very special position: being one of the few profitable public .coms.
Now lets just hope that they don't become yet another stock value management company.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That's really cool! Of course it looks like they copied the color scheme from BrickShelf
Is this good for the stakeholders in google? Probably. I cannot fault them for wanting to make a quick buck, and that's what this will be about, don't kid yourself.
I feel that this is their right; they built google, those who backed it so far deserve to make money off it if they can.
However, once this becomes public, any particular morals or ways in which the original people wanted to run it go out the door. The shareholders have a right to demand value, and that means google will have to sacrifice whatever it wants in order to increase revenue; it won't be enough to simply employ X people paid Y dollars a year in prepetuity; they will HAVE to show increased profits and growth. THat's the downfall of many public companies; the fact that, once public, they MUST grow. Even if they don't every attempt will be made to grow them until they die. It is not acceptable for a public company to sit and just keep up with inflation, and employ it's people; that's their fundamental problem.
Well said. And I can't help but have a feeling of dis-ease over the prospect of Google IPO-ing. Because, remember, when it's publically held, Google's emphasis will invariably shift from being the best search engine around to being the most profitable search engine around -- because that's the only reason most investors are going to buy the stock.
Innovative? Hasn't Altavista had this forever? Check out this image search on Slashdot.
I'm pretty sure Google has already been effected. Personally, I hope they're not affected.
Wait a minute... could it be that the Slashdot ubergeeks are unable to translate their mastery of the Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister into the eclectic, quirky English language?
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Got good enough. Read the updated story:
http://www.galstar.com/~jmccorm/review.html
It seems they decided to publish some of their emails on the web for some boneheaded reason. It explains the story fairly well.
Google uses keyword searching. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Keyword searching is a Dead-End Technology. It scales badly, throws too many false positives and too many false negatives, and makes no allowance for international variations in spelling.
Keyword searching by itself is a dead end. But Google isn't just keyword searching. Google's real strength is it's ability to distill information from links to and from web pages. Google effectively makes ever web page author an intelligent indicer. Google pulls out previously ignored data on the value of a web page. In short, Google works.
Keyword searching scales badly? Compared to what? There is no magical way to avoid looking at every page and doing some form of analysis. Every search engine needs to pay roughly the same price to build up their data set. As for searching, quickly collecting results from an optimized database is fast. Database work is a heavily studied and optimized area. Search cost should be sub-linear to the size of the database.
International variations? If you mean regional variations on the same language, it's solvable by keyword equivalence lists. Many search engines already know to search for misspellings and different conjugations. Again, what would you suggest to replace it?
But in a few years time, will Google be any more useful than Altavista? Google is already more useful than Altavista (in most areas). All Altavista can do is catch up to Google. Meanwhile Google can explore further improvements. If Google is foolish enough to sit on their laurels, they'll be overtaken by someone with a clever idea.
If not, then the investors would be better throwing their cash into an R&D house that might actually produce some long-term return.
Investors don't look three years into the future. They might see two years. Probably only one. Long term research is a fundamentally risky investment. Many times you don't develop something useful, you just discover things that don't work. Don't expect investors to sink money into big maybes.
All in all, it's a bit silly to predict doom for one of the most effective search engines without having a better idea to point to. Researches are working on better searching. Google itself came from such a project. I expect Google is doing some of that research itself.
First, let me say that I love Google, the search engine, and everything about the way it's been structured to date. However, I can't believe that they would try to IPO in this environment.
Look around at the "successful" dot coms. Yahoo's gone from 250 to 18. Amazon (yes, I know we hate it, but it's one of the few well-recognized dot coms on the Street) from 100 to 12.5. Transmeta, which IPO'ed only a short while ago, from the 40s to 6. It's that bad out there. Unless you're AOL, a company which really isn't an internet company anymore, or eBay, the only real survivor of the dot com era, you're not going to do anything on Wall Street. If Google is truly serious about IPO'ing this year, its price will probably start in the $7-8 range, and God help it if it warns, because it'll quickly fall below $5, oblivion for publicly traded companies (look at Loudcloud and Agere which IPO'ed a couple months ago).
Online advertising alone isn't enough to cut it. Without a real business model, Google's better off as it is, a geek's delight and out of the vicious spotlight cast on tech stocks by the financial markets.
What makes you think they did something wrong?
I would love to have started from my dorm room and ended up as any kind of corporate institution. (Loved and respected, preferably, but I'll take feared if that's the only quality left on the menu. Well, feared in a light cream sauce.) This is one of those rags-to-riches stories that the American Dream used to fuel.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
licensing the engine to other sites, and adwords (1 single, text-only, sponsored link). These are the 2 ways I know for sure are already happening, and they may have more ways.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
...I still think google's "I'm Feelin' Lucky" option should be a "Millionare" lifeline. My friends dont know $hit :)
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Personally I would wait if I were the Google staff. The market conditions for tech right now suck, and I think Google should look a bit more into making some form of money to show investors they can return their (the investors) money.
Take a look at Yahoo which peaked once as far as stocks went, nowadays its a crappy stock. Even Yahoo is having a hard time turning profit and even though Google is nice for searching, what else could they possibly offer via way of return funds to an investor with the minimal advertising thats done there?
Example, it seems that they've added sponsors to a particular search query which match what you're loking for, however when people want something they're searching for, how many people click those links?
It's a definite crappy market for now, and many investors see tech sleeping for a few years, and people are scared of dumping their money on tech stocks.
Want Root?
Why is now not, as you and other suggest, "a particularly good time to IPO"?
If a company has solid fundamentals, is increasing revenues and moving towards profitability while sustaining healthy growth, now is as good or better a time to go public than two years ago.
People who make this complaint seem to assume that the best time to go public is when everyone else is, when there is exuberance in the market and stock charts zooming all over the place. At such a time when public retail trader demand (and private institutional demand) for new IPOs was at an incredible high, you saw supply rise to meet the demand by pumping out one crappy IPO after another. Eventually, people started to realize that investing in companies with no fundamentals, no differentiation, no stable growth, no profits, etc.... was investing in (ahem) bad companies and they stopped doing it (public traders and private financiers).
I think it is more reasonable for quality companies, dotcom or no, to go public when the market itself is stable. There isn't the incredible demand that there used to be, sure- and there is even less supply. But when good companies good public, smart people (public and private) know they might be worth investing in. I think Google will probably fare rather well. By saying that, I mean that they'll close above their offer price- and by the end of the year- probably still be above that price. No, that isn't a VA Linux $350 2nd day closing price- but I bet Google won't drift down to $3.00 within 18 months, either, if they've become profitable.
Well, you still may think it is a hassle, but, if you took 1/10th of the time it took to complain about it, you'd see that a search for "+an ion-trap +that +will" at google will give you what you want. (in .23 seconds)
Other posts have mentioned how Yahoo! started as a directory. Remember Lycos? Search engine gone wrong. Remember AltaVista? Serach engine gone bad. Remember Excite? Search engine gone totally wrong.
These companies didn't all start with the intention of becoming bloated portals, but they wound up that way because there was a compelling business case that forced them to seek other methods of building revenue.
How is Google going to be different?
An IPO is primarily a means for a company to raise large amounts of cash with which to take the company up to the next level. That's the traditional case for an IPO, at least. In the past few years, the IPO has become a means of generating enough cash to build a company from thin air. Blame the companies all you want, but investors who didn't pay attention to the underlying mechanism of the IPO should take the blame just as well.
In the case of Google, I absolutely love it as search engine, but I'm not convinced I should love it as an investment. Let's hope Google is contemplating an IPO for the right reasons, and not as a means of staving off death.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Perhaps this may spark a return in confidence to the shares in the technology sector.
It also shows that if you offer a good service, word of mouth can make you a market leader. Perhaps M$ should bear this in mind instead of pi55ing around trying to tie everybody into Bill Gate's megalomania trip with very suspect EULA's for their development kits.
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach 18" Einstein
Yeah... Microsoft would never do something like buy into Corel and then cancel their Linux distro... Not that it's any big deal, Corel was not that great of a company, but as long as the courts are ineffective against MS, they won't give a good goddamn whether their actions look anticompetitive or not.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Well, as somebody who actually works in the field of web search engines, here's how keyword searches are seen:
"keyword searches suck, everything else sucks even more"
There is a pile of search engine carcasses proving it: the old lycos stemmer, the statistic excite approach, the OpenText structured data query, the Ask jeeves type-20-words to get the same old crappy answer you would get with a single keyword and the list goes on and on.
Yes, sooner or later researchers will find a way to go around keyword searches. But contrary to what you say, this is not bad news for Google. Nothing stops them from adopting the new technology when an alternative arises.
Just check out their beta image searching technology with the search term 'slashdot'.
Matt
I don't think so. The times they are changing. All of the sites you mention went IPO or where publicy held when being a "portal" was the next big thing. Well most people now understand that that whole idea is dead. Also Google puts the public search engine up because it has low marginal costs and pays for itself. Their real business is leasing the software/hardware to other businesses who want to use them as a backend. (This has been talked about in other threads here.) Think about Google is now the search engine part of Yahoo. They are everything the sites you mention where not making a nice profit and a solid model for making money. Having said that I don't think now is the right time for an IPO and think they would be better holding off for 6 months to a year. But the search engine part is already paying for itself so I think we are safe.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Yes they do sell stuff. A very good service and product to some very large companies. http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Goggle was on NPR yesterday claiming they had no current interent in an IPO. what gives?
I use Yahoo Groups all the time - they're great, better than eGroups were (a few nice features). The search is still fairly useful, and if you don't find it in the directory, it sends you to Google. Their mail service is the best free webmail around (very useful for accessing POP3 behind a firewall or at a public web terminal). My Yahoo still gives me useful news du jour. What's not to like?
sulli
RTFJ.
True. But unless there's a way to make good money staying private, what else can they do?
sulli
RTFJ.
Also, remaining private is not an option. When VCs are on board, there are three options for the company: go public, sell to another company, go out of business. The life of a VC fund is usually 10 years or less. The VC wants to sell the stock and distribute the proceeds, or have the company go public and distribute the stock before that. If the company is private, distributing the stock to fund investors is problematic. There are often contractual provisions that force the company to go public in some timeframe (ie. registration rights, redemption rights.)
With VCs involved, it was only a matter of time before Google went public or was sold. It shouldn't be a surprise, and noone can say management is selling out *now*. In the 'dude, you're a sell-out' sense of the word, they did that when Kleiner invested; in the literal selling out (their stock) sense, most likely they won't be able to do that until at least six months after the IPO.
Milo
One of the things people like about Google is that their page isn't cluttered my adverts. However, if you search for things of commercial interest you will find that there are "sponsored links" at the top of the page. This is where companies have paid specifically to have their page at the top when people search for particular words. Cars are a good example, look at bmw and fiat.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Yahoo also allowed stacking the deck. It was too easy to fight for a top spot on Yahoo. Unfortunately this burried what I was looking for under pages and pages of commericial sites. Try looking for free MP3's on Yahoo. It's a waste of time. You may find a teaser file once in a while burried in non MP3 music. Lots of pages of music are for sale in most anything but MP3. I quickly learned to look elswhere. I hope Google does not bury real content under the commercial interests. Yahoo search is one of the reasons Napster is doing so well. Indies can't be found on Yahoo due to the layers of other junk. Currently there is a trickling of sponser entries on Google. They are highlighted to make them easy to spot so you don't have the endless chasing of dead ends on Yahoo.
The truth shall set you free!
It's actually a 8000 node cluster now.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
I'm not sure what the sources for the BBC article were but as I recall, Google has a 4000 node Linux cluster running it, not "three large servers" as the BBC article satates.
It's nice to see a good company with an excelant reputation braving the Equity Markets. Good luck to them.
--CTH
---
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I don't know, but I think I'd wait until the economy/market improved a little...
Google is a good search engine and going IPO may ensure continuing service. But I fear that going IPO would force the company to divert itself from pure searching like what Excite, Altavista, etc. did.
¦ ©® ±
Perhaps they might also do indexing of data for corporate customers too. They have some pretty impressive partners as it is.
Yahoo! was a bright light in all the dim confusion of the internet, circa 1994. They helped coin the term 'Search Engine', and created a wonderful place where you could find just about any site you wanted, any time you wanted. What advertisting there was was never intrusive. What you wanted to find you could, at least before the massive growth of the internet over the last decade. To many, Yahoo was as much a 'home' on the internet as there was.
Now...
Yahoo is a corporate behemoth, almost, but not quite as reviled as Microsoft. They are quick to settle upon 'Intellectual Property' and fire off lawsuits as if they were free. Remember Geocities? Yahoo Geocities. Remember E-Groups? Yahoo Groups. A quick and nimble company created by two guys out of their dorm room is now one of the most feared corporate instituations on the planet.
Okay, Google, what did Yahoo do wrong here?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
- The company is owned by a select group of founders and investors, instead of a large anonymous mob of stockholders. The founders and investors are likely to know what's better for the company than stockholders seeking only returns on their investment.
- A private company's growth is a direct function of revenue, profit, and cash position. It's growth is a direct result of it's past successes. An IPO creates an unnatural influx of cash that the company didn't "earn" and doesn't necessarily know what to do with. It permits the company to spend money on things they wouldn't DREAM of spending money on if they were still private. In other words, it permits the company to make decisions and do things that are not necessarily good business.
- Sometimes what's best for the company is NOT growth and profit. R&D, poor market conditions, etc. -- any number of reasons to lay low. But stockholders demand PERFORMANCE, dammit! Private companies can employ more restraint.
- Private companies grow organically and typically foster a great deal of employee loyalty and a unique culture. Public companies grow way too fast and acquire smaller companies, destroying said loyalty and culture.
- All too often, going public has nothing to do with what's good for the company, and everything to do with pure, unabated GREED. It all has to do with a few people who want to get very rich very fast. I say screw 'em. They should earn their fortunes the old fashioned way instead: WORK.
Just looking around, I would say that a great deal of what's BAD about America is publicly held corporations. Since when is what is good for stockholders good for America? Big picture here, folks. I say better to have thousands of small private companies than 4 large public corporatations.Tim O'Reilly has stated more than once that he has no intention of bringing O'Reilly public (for many of the reasons I mention above). I applaud him for doing the right thing. Google shouldn't go public. They should succeed on their own merits.
Check out some of the prices here. There are other options priced as well, if you click on the overview link.
:-)
And, since you have to contact a sales rep for a custom quote if you want a custom solution, I'm guessing it's not very cheap
Why is the sky blue?
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
I don't think MS would be able to invest thx to the anti-trust thing, else they would gobble up so many great (but unfortuantely economically troubled) rivals. VA Linux? Red Hat? MS could buy them up and put the tab on Steve Balmer's "Player's Club" card. But MS has a huge image problem right now...they've got to remain large while keeping a low profile. No more "Hotmail" or "C-NET" deals for MS...not for a while, anyway. I'm not saying they wouldn't LOVE to do so (and hell, we might benefit from it...SmartLinks to google searches would sure beat jumps to MSPROPAGANDA.ORG), just that it would look very bad...and we'd end up with a bunch of "Baby Bills."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Think of Google's strengths: low powered non wintel servers delivering fast pages with high quality and low download times with caching and a nice inline sponsor system.
Google is everything that DotCom '99 WASN'T...it is neat, but without flash or fancy...in fact, the style of google is definitely lowtech (it looks the same on Lynx as it does in IE). Google really was the start of a new wave of successful content, and they're no doubt making tons of ducats leasing their machines and technology to anybody who needs to search...and it's actually GOOD. Hell, Google picked up my webpage AND I NEVER EVEN SUBMITTED IT. Neither did any of my linkers submit their pages...Google genuinely crawled to it, and even cached it (not a big hit...my front page is maybe 2k). Furthermore, surfers trust google because of it's high quality...it has no need to build a brand, because WoM has more than succeeded.
If Google goes IPO, and manages to remain of high quality, it means the beginning of a new Dot com boom -- one based on everything the original wasn't, and uncovering the type of quality necessary to bring the web into the age of frictionless content we've needed. No banner ads, no obtuse simulacrums of greatness, just the same basic faced technology that make the toaster or the 24 oz. drinking glass such insanely great inventions.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The business, which is based in California, plans to break even before the end of the year, while analysts forecast annual revenues of about $50m by 2002.
Google has built its revenues from advertising and also from licensing its proprietary search technology to other websites and portals.
I hope this is better researched than the article's description of the servers! If I needed to buy a search engine, Google would be one of the first places I'd look, but how much can they get for that? And what happens when someone puts a better search engine on the market? The worst aspect of an IPO (in the USA at least) is that now the company is pretty much committed to showing a profit every quarter, and most software sells irregularly.
I guess they do sell some advertising, but internet advertising is not a great revenue stream either. It's too easy for the advertisers to confirm that their advertisements are being ignored, so they put the big money into TV ads where they don't get direct confirmation of all the mute buttons going on & tapes being fast-forwarded... For another example of what's wrong with advertising, Google's own quite successful "advertising strategy" was to rely on word of mouth rather than paid advertising. Apparently you still don't have to advertise a product that stands out on its own merits!
Having said that, anybody know how we can get in on the IPO? Or is it, as usual, only open to the priveleged.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I hope that this IPO doesn't affect Google's on-site masseuses. That'd be a shame.
Personally, I would still hold off on an IPO for a few months. While they could (potentially) start a trend if they did it now, they wouldn't get much at this stage in the game.
Not everyone is well versed in corporate finance. So here goes.
IPO stands for Initial Public Offering. It's simply the first time that a company's stock is offered to the general public. It is underwritten by an investment bank, such as Bear Stearns, where they function as the dealer for the stock. IPO's are useful since they provide much cash quickly for further investment and growth for the company.
I think what they have failed to do is venture into the outside world in the last year, to witness that the days of dotcom hucksterism is over, and stock holders realize that you can't have a profitable company selling banner ad space.
It's sad to see Google out there to prey on unwitting stock buyers, because you can be 99% certain that after the initial IPO at $160/share, they are going to fall even farther through the floor than VA has.
Honestly, this is like hearing that Slashdot is going to announce an IPO. Nice product, but it won't make you a penny in profits.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
This is actually fairly simple.
First, the ads don't show up on the start page, which is a good thing. That way you don't lose people right out of the chute.
Second, the ads that they do feature don't look like ads. They're plain text. This is accomplished through their AdWords service which allows prominent placement just above the search results for companies whose chosen profile matches your search.
This provides better speed, less frustration, and helps eliminate the feeling that you and your precious bandwidth are being sold indiscriminately.
"What is the purpose of reality?" When you can answer the question, it will be time for you to leave.