It had to hap­pen, they couldn’t seem to hold off for much longer. The BBC has the story Google to sell $2.7bn in shares, so does Slash­dot: Google Files for IPO. Inter­est­ingly Google’s own press cen­ter is not yet car­ry­ing the story.

I only hope that what they are offer­ing is not the major­ity of the com­pany, that is, I hope that Sergey and Larry retain abso­lute con­trol. Some­how I doubt that! I think it would be very unusual.

There has been a lot of spec­u­la­tion about what a major­ity third party share­holder interest in Google will do to the value of it’s search res­ults. I think that mat­ters less than it did. They know they have been los­ing mar­ket share in the search engine arena and quite rap­idly in recent months. I believe they have star­ted to diver­sify and will con­tinue to do so. If they can get it right (and that is a big ‘if’) GMail will be a killer app. And I think with all the spe­cial­ized search engine and AI com­pan­ies they have been buy­ing they have some­thing stun­ningly clever up their col­lect­ive sleeves.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

update: Wow! I was wrong to doubt. It looks like Google will be buck­ing the trend and retain­ing abso­lute con­trol within the com­pany. This art­icle at Wired More Reas­ons to Love Google has the info and much more besides. From page two of the article:

A dual class stock struc­ture will keep con­trol of Google in the hands of its founders.