Yesterday, Google announced plans to raise $2.7 billion for its pending IPO (see "Google Comes Out of the Closet"). We picked through its S-1 filing and found these eye-opening details:

1.       An army of Googlers: Nearly 2,000 people work for Google, up from 284 at the end of 2001.

2.       Student loans: Cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed Google while students at Stanford University. The school owns a patent to PageRank, the core of Google’s search technology. The company has a perpetual license to this patent, which becomes non-exclusive in 2011.

3.       Networking skills: The Google Network – the collection of outside Web sites the company provides advertising and search services to – is becoming more important. These sites accounted for 21 percent of Google’s revenues in the first quarter of 2004, up from 15 percent in 2003.

4.       Outside help: Google is adopting a tried and tested strategy of large corporations: outsourcing. The company is in the process of transferring its billing, collection and credit evaluation functions to another company.

5.       A chink in the armor?: Google warns that as more information on the Web comes in formats like Microsoft Word, companies like Microsoft could engineer its documents to hamper Google from searching them – or give its own search engines preferential access. Another concern: companies could demand royalties from Google for searching documents produced in its format.

6.       Overexposure: Google’s brand might just become too big. The company warns that if “Google” becomes another term for “search,” it could lose protection for its trademark. The upshot: other companies could use Google in identifying their own products.

7.       Foreign legion: Google owns 95 international domain names, including Google.de, Google.fr, Google.co.uk, Google.co.jp, and Google.ca. Google is available in 97 languages. International revenues made up 30 percent of Google's total revenue in the latest quarter.

8.       Jet set: Google paid $278,119 to Apex Aviation, a corporate jet management company, in 2003 for the use of two jets that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has an ownership interest in. Mr. Schmidt has agreed to pay Google any yearly profits that he makes on his ownership stake in these jets.

9.       Mismatched?: Some partnership deals could be costing Google. Agreements with “a small number” of sites guarantee them a negotiated minimum fee. If Google makes less money from these partnerships than the minimum it agreed to pay, it has to eat the difference. In 2003, this cost Google $22.5 million in cost of revenues related to specific deals where it lost money.

10.   Patent squabbles: In 2002, Overture Services (which is now owned by Yahoo) sued Google, claiming that its AdWords program infringes on certain claims of an Overture patent. The case is yet to be decided.