Nov 22, 2006, 1:25 GMT
San Francisco - Internet search giant Google saw its stock rise almost 3 per cent Tuesday to close at 509.65 dollars per share, giving the company a value of 156 billion dollars.
Reaching the 500 dollar milestone represented a six-fold increase over its share price when it went public in August 2004, and gave the company a value greater than the combined worth of Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.
Half of all search queries in the US in September used Google, more than twice the volume of second-place Yahoo, according to research firm Nielsen/Net-Ratings. According to research firm EMarketer about 25 per cent of the 15.9 billion dollars that is expected to be spent on online advertising this year will land in Google's coffers.
The company was started in 1996 by Stanford University computer science doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page who are now among the wealthiest individuals in the world.
Google is now Silicon Valley's second most valuable business, behind Cisco Systems, eclipsing the likes of Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, and Hewlett-Packard, a high-tech pioneer that also started in a garage 67 years ago.
Last month the company paid 1.65 billion dollars for the online video site YouTube.
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