WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- In a move to raise more than $4.2 billion for possible acquisitions, Google Inc. announced Thursday it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering by the company of 14 million shares of Class A common stock.
Shares of Google dropped $5.11, or 1.79 percent, to close at $279.99 in Thursday trading on the news.
The managing underwriters of the proposed offering are Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc. and Credit Suisse First Boston LLC, acting as joint book-running managers, and Allen & Company LLC, acting as co-manager. The underwriters have an option to purchase up to 600,000 additional shares of Class A common stock from Google solely to cover over-allotments, Google said in a statement.
This large public offering is the latest move in what has been a skyrocket ride for the dot-com, which debuted its first public offering this time last year and is currently worth an estimated $80 billion. Its stock traded at a high of $317.80 in mid-July.
Google had its foundations in a Stanford dorm room and grew quickly. But unlike many of its tech brothers, Google opted not to go public during the dot-com craze, as it was still in its infancy during the waning days of the boom.
And then came the March 2000 tech and Internet stock crash, which made the financial climate highly unfavorable for any tech IPOs.
In the meantime, the company has busied itself growing in usership and perfecting its business model. Google is primarily an advertising-driven company during and era when Net advertising has been strongly on the upswing. The company also benefits from holding a nearly 50-percent share of the search market, being the search engine of choice for many Netsurfers, according to a Nielsen/NetRatings report released in July.
Started seven years ago by two enterprising Stanford students -- the same school which brought the world Yahoo! -- Google quickly gained in the search ranks by virtue of its so-called page-ranking system, which often made for more successful and accurate searches. Founders computer-science Ph.D. candidates Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated the page-ranking algorithm while still in school, surmising, among other factors, that pages linked to more often (more popular) were greater sources of information.
According to company history, Page's Stanford dorm room became Google's data center while Brin's room served as the business office. The two students put their studies on hold, raised $1 million in funding from family, friends and angel investors to start the company.
On Sept. 7, 1998, Google was incorporated and moved to its first office in a friend's Menlo Park, Calif., garage with four employees. Initially, Google answered an average of 10,000 search queries per day. Also in 1998, PC Magazine included Google, which was still in its "beta" testing phase, in the list of Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for that year. At the time of its launch, Google faced such large-scale competitors as AltaVista and Yahoo! (also started at Stanford by Brin-and-Page friend David Filos), both of which already had millions of users.
The search engine has worked its way into popular vernacular with the verb "to Google" someone, meaning to look up their background information -- with "Googling" becoming a popular facet of the dating ritual and among ego-battling colleagues who want to see who has more Internet listings.
While Google's SEC filings said the company was close to making a "material acquisition,'' there has been speculation on Wall Street that the company is interested in expansion on a number of fronts including acquisition of Chinese search engine Baidu, which recently had a high-flying IPO.
