The One Slow Thing About Google?

June 18 -- Remember when every dot-com wanted to go public?

It may seem like ages ago that scores of Internet start-ups were making splashy initial public offerings, floating their shares on the stock market and turning countless 20-something CEOs into short-lived millionaires.

In reality, it's been roughly two years since the dot-com IPO boom came crashing to a halt. And for evidence of how much times have changed, consider the success of search engine Google, one of the Web's most frequently-visited sites. Despite repeated Silicon Valley rumblings that an offering is in the offing, Google has been quietly resisting the IPO urge.

"We have no plans to go public at this time," says David Krane, Google's director of corporate communications, invoking a phrase that has become something of a company mantra.

Yet Google's apparent decision to shun a quick IPO serves as a case study in the benefits of remaining private. A Web site with an innovative technology but a seemingly narrow function, it has gradually increased its services, started turning profits and, in its own way, become nearly as familiar a part of the Internet landscape as America Online, Microsoft or Yahoo!

Quick to Search, Slow to Go Public

Google's comparatively long IPO fuse may be the slowest thing about the company, founded in 1998 by a pair of Stanford graduate school students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., rapidly became a Web favorite due to its innovative approach to searching.

Rather than produce search results according to the frequency with which certain keywords appear, or accept money to list some Web pages at the top of a search results list, Google lists pages in order of how many links point to them. Thus the results for a "World Cup" query on Google, for example, should start with World Cup sites that are the most popular among other Web sites.

This approach, along with the sheer speed of Google's search engine — helped by the minimalist, essentially graphics-free look of the home page — has made the site the Web's leading search service, and one of the most popular destinations on the entire Internet. According to New York-based Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, Google was the sixth-most popular Web property in April.