As expected, the overnight jump in Google shares based on the Q3 results the Internet company had after the bell Tuesday was nothing short of a home run -- literally. GOOG shares closed at around $426 on Thursday evening, and then 30 minutes later Google announced its latest quarterly results, and again the company easily passed consensus expectations for revenue and profit.

Can anything stop Google? It seems like nothing can these days. Friday morning, GOOG shares opened to the tune of nearly $456 per share, quite a nice overnight jump. For the week, GOOG shares closed at $459.67, an impressive jump of $33.61 or 7.89% from Thursday's close.

With Google gaining almost 8% overnight, the estimates from many analysts started their bull run again, with Jim Cramer bumping his estimate from $500 to $560 per share along with Citigroup going for the jugular and a $600 price target. Will Google get there?

It seems that Google can do no wrong as it constantly blows past quarterly estimates again and again, while competitor Yahoo!'s shares are in the doghouse. And although Yahoo! remains the #1 overall visited web property, Google is catching up fast. Adding Youtube to the mix may mean Google will be the largest diversified Internet company in terms of eyeballs very soon. Now, if it can start making money with all those eyeballs beyond search advertising, the sky won't even be the limit. Stay tuned for more quarters and we'll all see.

Here are a few blogging highlights for Google from this past week:

Google blows past Q3 earnings expectations, a I liveblog the event

Is Google neglecting some of its web properties these days?

UTube.com traffic spikes when Google-Youtube announcement hits hype fever pitch

Google goes solar at corporate HQ in a lesson on how to go green big-time

Big media chomping at the bit to go after Google now that it's acquired Youtube

A garage? Has Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) finally lost it?

Not really. You see, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google, they rented out a garage (the company was incorporated on September 7, 1998). It was about 1,900 square feet – and, of course, ultimately turned into a $125 billion empire.

It's something that happens with some frequency in Silicon Valley. For example, in 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started their legendary company from a modest garage (Hewlett-Packard Company, NYSE:HPQ, now owns it).

As for the Google garage, it is based in Menlo Park and will now become a Silicon Valley landmark of sorts. Oh, there is even a hot tub on the property. But, apparently, the co-founders did work tirelessly on their search engine.

On the Google corporate site, you can get some info on the early history.

The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology.

Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

After having followed this rather bizarre story for a few months now, it seems that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have settled with an aircraft restorer that was hired by the pair. The Google co-founders hired renowned Oklahoma aircraft desginer and restorer Les Jennings to customize a Boeing 767 that the pair bought for personal use.

The requests from the pair delved into the odd and mysterious (and expensive), from hammocks swinging from the ceiling to presidential-quality state rooms and dining rooms for the pair and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Both Page and Brin accused Jennings of leaking secret details about the Boeing plane to the press, in breach of a court-ordered confidentiality clause, and they took Jennings to court over this. As of today this suit has been dropped by Brin and Page, although the original breach of contract suit will still press forward.

The original suit accused Jennings of not completing requests on time as per the contracted schedule. Apparently this will all press on now as planned, even though the charges against Jennings for actually talking about the plane publicly have now been dismissed.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

From last week's feeding frenzy over results from the Internet and computer behemoths -- Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft -- let's focus in on the difference between the two most direct competitors from that bunch (whether the companies admit it or not): Google and Yahoo! Yahoo's earnings were, by all accounts, excellent.

I love it when the quarter is described only as "meeting analyst expectations," who cares? A company's results should be determined by more fundamental measures such as competitive gains, profit gains, growth (realistic), and EPS: not by "analyst expectations." But, I digress.

Yahoo! profit dipped from last year, mostly because the company sold quite a few Google shares in the year-ago period to make the quarter shine. Revenue increased 26% to land at $1.58 billion. Result: YHOO shares fell nearly 18% right after the announcement. Oh my -- as always, the market lost its head (not sure if it has one).

Google results were stellar and blew away "analyst estimates" by every measure -- $721 million in profit on sales of $2.46 billion. With a $2.33 EPS figure and a 77% revenue increase, Google's second quarter just upped the bar once again for the search giant. Result: GOOG shares fell almost all day before the earnings were released and slowly gained in after-hours trading. I still feel that Google shares are overvalued, but the company does continue to have incredibly impressive quarters. Will Google's sky slowly fall one of these quarters? Hard to say, but if it continues to give customers what they want and serve ads that work for the customer, Google's sky may just remain blue for a long while.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were hoping to be throwing some massive mile-high parties by now. Instead their party plane is weighed down by lawsuits.

According to a story in today's Wall Street Journal, Page and Brin's private jet is the subject of multiple lawsuits over its renovations -- originally budgeted to take ten months and cost $10 million. Page and Brin bought the used Boeing 767 widebody, designed to carry 180 passengers, as a private jet last year and promised to use it to take lots of their friends to places like Africa.

Hey, I might like to do things like that if I was a billionaire. Don't worry, shareholders. The tab for the jet is not on Google's books. This is a private plane, technically owned by a holding company called Blue City Holdings, LLC.

The plans for the plane reportedly were to include a "lounge" for Google Chief Exec Eric Schmidt, two "state rooms" for Brin and Page, a dining room, and additional seating for passengers (near the back, of course). Apparently designer Leslie Jennings had to accommodate strange requests from Brin and Page, including having hammocks installed hanging from the plane's ceiling. I'm imagining a tropical feeling at 35,000 feet right now, maybe.

Page and Brin had reportedly had a few spats over the size of the beds in their bedrooms. Schmidt reportedly had to step in and say, "Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom."

 

With Sergey Brin transversing to Washington this week to meet with lawmakers (and apparently their stuffed-shirt attitudes) on net neutrality, he's also in the hot seat for referencing that Google should not have censored its results on its Chinese search site -- and that Google may just leave China altogether. While this seems like a far-fetched statement -- with China being the fastest-growth internet country on the planet -- it does harken back to Google "doing no evil". China's repressive communist regime and inexcusable human rights travesties make it a target for many critics, yet more U.S companies have set up shop there for the incredible cost savings. These companies apparently don't mind "doing a little evil" if it translates into profits for shareholders, right?

Well, Google may be in the decision mode to exit China completely, insofar as its China domain (www.google.cn), leaving its worldly Google domain (www.google.com) intact, although the Chinese government would sure block all remaining access to the local domain as well. This is quite a reversal from Google's earlier stance, and regarding the "right thing to do" for civilization and to fall inline with Google's mantra of "do no evil" this is, strangely, a welcome admission from the Google folks.

The question begs regarding the enigmatic power structure behind Google: just who runs the place? Common wisdom says that it's Eric Schmidt, the former Novell and Sun Micro executive who founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought in to run the company some years ago. But, Google is an uncommon company and conventional wisdom sometimes takes a backseat to what comes out of the Google machine.

It's a very good thing for Google the company to have a very recognizable CEO as the frontman-face of the company. But, many bets are that Google is still "run" (read: evangelized) by founders Page and Brin, and sure: there needs to be fiscal discipline in place and standard corporate structure to keep Google from imploding on itself as its scale and growth continue to blast away. But, again -- who really runs Google? My bet is on the employees (down-up management, if you will) more than any leader dictating what Google does (up-down management). Is this a good thing for investors? A-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y.

In the annual Google shareholder's meeting last week, Sergey Brin -- co-founder of the company -- responded in a very neat and tidy way to an investor's questioning whether Google stock would soon split so that the shares could become more affordable to the everyday investor. I, for one, loved his response, although I was not surprised -- Googlefolk are generally straight-up and speak their minds about such things.

Brin's response was that Google had no plans to split the common stock -- or do away with the dual-class stock structure -- since it was in the investor's best interest to heavily research GOOG stock and then make a decision on whether to support and help own the company by buying shares. This response, which is needed more often than not in the market, is a good reminder that we all need to do our due diligence before buying stock, something that the everyday investor often fails to do.

Here was Brin's response: "We'd rather not have that shareholder who says on a whim, '$20 bucks a share seems cheap, I think I'll buy it,' " -- and then he emphasized the research one should do before owning any piece of any public company. Kudos, and excellent advice. A low share price may mean an average individual investor can purchase more shares, but in no way reflects that the stock is actually inexpensive.

Google continues to demonstrate its particular brand of goofy-yet-financially sound thinking, as the company indicated in a proxy filing yesterday. CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will collect $1 in salary for 2006, just as they did for 2005. According to the filing, "Their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."

(On a multiples basis, however, they might have the highest bonuses anywhere; Brin was paid $1,723 in bonus, with Schmidt and Page collecting a tidy $1,630, over 1600 times their annual salaries!)

Google also announced that the company intends to forgo dividends to its shareholders "in the foreseeable future."