Some details here: www.google-ipo.com (an unofficial site with lots of pointers)

In a nutshell, it's finally going to happen. Some shares will be available through the usual brokerage process. Other shares will be offered through some kind of auction, possibly hosted on Google's web site. Specifics about how the auction would work have not been specified yet.

Thanks very much for this information. Anyone wanna hazard a guess on how they'll do?

Taking into account the unbelievable amount of hype behind this IPO, I have no doubt that they'll do EXTREMELY well with it to start - or at least the lucky few who get in on it will do extremely well. Then it'll spend a considerable amount of time correcting itself. I think overall it'll be a great long-term investment after the dust settles. I also wish like hell I was one of the lucky few.

Yeah, it's just so much easier to invest in a company that has real revenue & has met that silly little metric called profitable. I'm sure they'll do great.

-Zeke

So an auction for selling IPO shares ... Doesn't that mean the market will set the share price PRIOR to the IPO opening (rather than the artificial price set by the underwriting company), so the price will probably not shoot up like other IPO's? Or will it open with an already inflated price and then proceed to inflate even more because people think that's what it should do?

...or deflate like a leaky balloon (or like AT&T Wireless) when people begin to think they have overpaid...

The billion dollar question is exactly how the auction will work. They've been quite quiet on the exact specifics of how the auction will work. I generally agree that hype from clueless investors will push the auction price far above reality, after which there will be an unpleasant correction. I fully expect Google to settle in with some insane P/E ratio and to be extremely turbulent with respect to the rest of the market. I'm undecided on whether it would be a good long-term investment, not because the company may have problems, but because the stock price may be significantly divorced from the company's actual profits.

What do you guys think of Google's two-class share structure and not very positive reaction to that from some 'corporate governance experts'? I think that, if I were in Google founders' shoes, I would do something similar.

It's hard to say, but I think the two-class stock thing is unnecessary. Even after selling billions of dollars of shares, the founders will still retain significant control over the companay. Furthermore, their "do no evil" mantra has actually resulted in much of what makes Google worthwhile, e.g., their keyword-based advertising program, their continued fight to maintain fair rankings, etc. If Google were, as a result of shareholder pressure, to suddenly become evil, then one of their competitors would probably snatch away their business, just like they did to AltaVista.

As of today, Google is worth over 80 billion dollars. That's more than the world's largest media company.

A search engine. Wow.

Calling them just a search engine is short sighted. I caught the Charlie Rose interview with their CEO yesterday, and it was pretty fascinating. Their scope is just ridiculous. I can't relay all the things he talked about, but if you can catch a repeat or audio version it's worth watching/listening. But at any rate, they are/plan on being so much more than a search engine... that's just the prototype interface for everything else they are doing.

The most interesting thing he talked about to me at least, was the internal development structure. That place must be incredible to work at if you are hyper intelligent and at least a little motivated to do something that interests you.

Either way... 80 Billion. Jees.

Yeah, I know they are more than "just" a search engine, but that's what they are to 90% of their users out there. They must have done something special (as I'm sure we all know) considering all of the other search engines that are struggling.

Stuff like this can just get kinda odd. I remember when Hughes Network Systems (owner of DirecTV and at the time, part of General Motors) was worth MORE than General Motors (even when GM included Hughes!). So, there was speculation that some company could buy all of GM, spin off Hughes and then sell GM for $1 and still make a profit because they bought Hughes for under market value. So a company with only a few million subscribors and a few dozen satellites was worth more than the biggest corporation in the world with millions of their products on the road.

Or when internet companies seemed like a "fad" until AOL bought TimeWarner. I g uess that money is real huh?

Absolutely, I meant to add that. And you're right, Altavista used to be just as clutter as the inexplicably popular Yahoo.

Of course, with Firefox, my main Google page now looks like this:

Exactly! Who would have thought you could model such a site around search-related text ads? Granted, at the time banner ads were, IMO, worse than they are today even, so I think that helped.