I have no idea whether Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will hit the $650 target issued today by Derek Brown of Cantor Fitzgerald, but I'm sure that the record he set will be broken. It will be interesting next year to see if Wall Street analysts and the business press can find new superlatives to show their admiration for the search engine giant.

By the way, can my fellow journalists retire "Gaga for Google" and its variations? The first 2,000 or so times people used the phrase it was mildly amusing. I even jumped on the band wagon. Now, it's just silly. I did a search on Google -- where else -- for "Gaga for Google" and got 437,000 results. That's scary.

On a more serious note, shares of Google are up about 9% this year, in-line with the Nasdaq. Ironically. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), which is spending huge amounts of money to catch up to Google in search, rose 14%. Other big-cap names including Apple Computer Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) also outperformed Google.

Shares of Google are trading at about $100 under the $545 median price of Wall Street analysts. The stock hit a high of $513 on November 13. It's going to take more than bullish target price targets to overcome investors' lingering uncertainty about the sustainability of Google's growth that's keeping the stock below where Wall Street believes it should be.

--Jonathan Berr is editor of http://www.desperateinvestors.com

Google price targets will go even higher originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.