Google causing waves with its latest update and IPO Offering
Date Published: Aug 17th, 2004
Google is causing waves with both their latest update to their
database, and in the stock markets. Just this month alone, there
are three big bumps in the road for Google to declare its IPO.
Google asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to
declare its IPO effective on Tuesday evening (August 17th).
Google is expected to start accepting bids one hour after the
SEC declares the offering to be effective. The preliminary price
is expected to be in the range of $108 to $135 which was set in
July.
Google said it will begin accepting bids as soon as one hour
after the SEC declares the offering to be effective.
A few road bumps ahead for Google, and these are just from
August!
- The SEC launches an informal inquiry after find out that
Google failed to register 23 million shares and 5.6 million
options.
- Google Settles a patent dispute with Yahoo!. Google issues
Yahoo! 2.7 million shares, worth more than 300 million and as
a result is expecting a 3rd quarter loss.
- Possible violation of the SEC quiet period restrictions
with the latest Playboy magazine interview. The SEC extends
the quiet period from the time the company files a
registration statement with the SEC until they declare the
registration statement effective. During this timeframe, the
federal securities laws limit what information a company and
related parties can make available to the public.
Just this month alone resulted in a few road blocks that
Google has to deal with. Also, Google plans on using Dutch
Auction. In theory, buyers pay more for stock in Dutch auction
IPOs than in ordinary IPOs, which means more money will go to
the firm that is selling shares. With the two tier system they
have in place, the shares they are selling will only count as
one vote, where as the other shares will have 10 times the
voting power. This is good for Google as it will leave the
majority of the power with them. With Googles shares expected to
be above $100, this could be making some investors wary about
the possibility of the stock being able to be profitable. Some
companies that have issued stocks over $100 per share often had
to split the stocks in the future. Could this be a possibility
for Google and its shares? Googles latest algorithm update has
been causing an uproar amongst website owners and internet
marketing consultants this past few days. PageRank is missing on some of the home pages, old copies of sites showing in Googles cached version
of their pages, and the number of incoming links are
fluxuating on some sites as well. Some possible issues that
could of been responsible for this latest update was the
research paper released from Microsoft hinting at how they
plan on improving on PageRank and HITS. The Google
contest that took place recently positioning the term Nigritude Ultramarine, this had to of sparked interest with
Google in how easy people were able to manipulate the results
and bring their listings to the the top of the search engine
rankings. A combination of Blogging and Google bombing was
used with the Nigritude Ultramarine contest. For more information on MSNs latest research please see
Block-level Link Analysis.
This is a great read and if this is just a glimpse into what the
new MSN has in store, the search engine wars will certainly
continue at full velocity. I for one will be very interested as
many others will to see how good and spam free the new MSN
results will be. I just hope MSN is able to filter out spam
better than it currently does with its hotmail program.
UPDATE: Thursday August 19th, 2004
Google opened into the public markets Thursday August 19th, 2004
at $85 and the time of writing this article, the stock is at
$103.26 on the Nasdaq stock market. So far a one day jump of
$18.26.
UPDATE: Friday June 3rd, 2005
I thought I would post on how Google's stock has been doing
since it originally opened up. The data below was taken from the
Yahoo Finance section. It is simply amazing how the stock has
been performing since September 2004.
Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning
Search Marketing
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