With Google about to enter the quiet period that precedes an initial public offering, Wired magazine thoroughly scrutinizes the world's biggest search engine and all that it has become. "Googlemania," the cover story in the March 2004 issue, is a 13-part package that delves into the company, whose IPO is being cast as a savior, a harbinger of rebirth in Silicon Valley.
"Surviving IPO Fever," the Wired feature's lead story (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html) chronicles what happens to companies like Google during the white-hot quiet period that leads up to going-public day to determine whether CEO Eric Schmidt and his team have built a company that can survive the coming shock and remain focused and productive.
While some companies do reverse stock splits to reach a target opening share price, Google has done the opposite and doubled the number of shares to be issued, Wired reports. This has further increased anticipation for the offering.
Wired Contributing Editor Josh McHugh credits Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page with convincing venture capitalists in 1998 that the company could actually make money serving up minimalist, fast-loading, text-only ads. Six years later, those little ads accounted for more than $600 million in revenue, as Google reinvents itself into an advertising company. "It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World" explains how AdWords, a self-service ad server that uses relevance-ranking algorithms similar to the search engine's, contributes to clickthrough at more than 10 times the rate of the average banner ad.
"Google vs. Gates" reveals that the mutual admiration and fear between Google and Microsoft is heating up. After Google introduced an engine to search Microsoft-related Web pages, the software company said it would revamp MSN Search to return faster, algorithmically driven results a la Google. Then Google reportedly spurned Microsoft's $10 billion buyout bid in Fall 2003, and at the World Economic Forum in January 2004, Bill Gates declared that his next generation engine would out-Google Google.
