Net Results: What is Google up to? Is this company ready for the adulthood of being a public company - or more pointedly, ready to relinquish the adolescent freedom of remaining private?

Everything about its bumbling progress towards its unconventional initial public offering (IPO) auction - yes, auction - seems to indicate that, while this may be a company that has worked the net and its possibilities with slick and technically clever professionalism, it is still stuck in the world of dotcom immaturity when it comes to going public.

Some might substitute the word "unconventionality" for "immaturity" - but I wouldn't. The company seems to think (like the more misguided and arrogant of the dotcom era crash victims) that it can say and do what it wants even at the point where it is asking us, the public, to give it money.

A recurring complaint from investors and analysts while Google executives were doing its pre-IPO roadshow was how reluctant it was to divulge specifics about its operations and prospects - the details investors really need to know to gauge the value of a company.

Others have pointed to Google's previous cult of secrecy.

Last May, around the time Google filed for its IPO, I wrote about an article by technology writer Simson Garfinkel which noted how Google, when it does release a few so-called statistics, consistently understates the capabilities of its search technology, its numbers of servers, the speed at which it does searches and more.

The article reports a presentation given by Dr Martin Farach-Colton, professor of computer science at Rutgers University in the US, who spent two years at Google. He noted how all talks by executives were first vetted by the company.

He also shows how the maths don't add up for the hardware and capabilities Google offers as corporate fact. Mr Garfinkel guesses that this is because it is to the company's advantage not to let other companies have real figures for benchmarking their own search technologies.

That's all very fine and mystery-preserving for a privately held company.

But now Google is going public and still wants to keep such information hidden, seemingly assuming that investors will be so feverishly excited about the IPO that they won't care.

Clearly, some do care. This week, after lower-than- expected interest in the IPO, the company slashed its expected share price range and reduced the number of shares it will offer, placing the value of the company at an estimated $26 billion (€21 billion) rather than Google's initial estimate of $36 billion.

Shyness about its operations is not all that has baffled IPO watchers.

Google has also made some surprising missteps. In one startling development earlier this month, the company admitted it had incorrectly offered shares to employees and consultants in apparent violation of Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) laws.

Then, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin inexplicably conducted an interview with Playboy magazine in April - only a week before they announced the IPO - that has run now, right in time for the auction.

Statements made in the interview have required Google to file three amended statements to the SEC "correcting" information offered by Google's founders - the two people who are running the Google IPO roadshow.

To begin with, it is extremely odd for company executives ever to give an interview in what is termed a company's "quiet period" before an IPO, because of inherent dangers to the IPO process. In an unguarded moment, or even when the executives feel they are being correctly cautious, statements can be made that later are viewed as misleading to investors.

In addition, the "corrected" statements sure leave one wondering about how familiar the two founders are with the operations of their company, or whether they have realised yet that they need to be a bit more straightforward with the public if they are to be a public company.

In the interview, the founders state that Google has about 1,000 employees. The correction, however, notes the figure is actually now 2,292 employees. Where did almost 1,300 more employees come from, and how could they not know this key, basic figure?

The company also issued this bizarre statement: "The article states that more than 65 million people use our search engine each day. We believe that this number represents monthly, not daily, domestic visitors data as compiled by a third-party research organisation." Huh?

What do they mean, they "believe" this number represents monthly, not daily, figures? Surely they know? The difference is nearly two BILLION users in a monthly period.

Google may be the most invaluable tool I know of on the internet, but its internet smarts don't seem to have transferred to IPO smarts.