"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one" said company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a letter to investors filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission alongside the IPO registration statement.
Dubbed an "Owner's Manual for Shareholders", the letter details how the co-founders propose to run the company once it becomes public. The letter warns:
"As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same.
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes, this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter'. In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you'."
The filing also reveals for the first time the profits earned by the company - $105.6 million net profit last year, with $961.9 million generated in revenue.
The company is seeking $2.7 billion from the flotation, but has not yet disclosed the number of shares to be sold, or the price at which they will be offered, said CNET News.com. Unusually, the entire offering will be sold by means of an auction, which should give the public a greater chance of purchasing the shares before they become traded publicly.
The flotation of Google has been eagerly anticipated for three years. Many expect it to revitalise tech and internet stocks across the board and compare it to the successful flotation of Netscape in 1995.
It was in the year of Netscape's $1 billion flotation that Brin, then 23, met fellow Stanford University graduate Larry Page, then 24 and at the time best known for having built a working printer out of Lego.
In January 1996 Brin and Page began work on a search engine called BackRub, named for its ability to analyse the "back links" pointing to a given web site.
BackRub evolved into Google in 1998, named after the word "googol," a mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros – a higher number than even the most optimistic valuations of Brin and Page's company.