Google shares have more than doubled since the company's initial public offering at $85 per share in August. The stock fell $1.47 to $196.13 at 2:08 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading after touching $199.88. They traded as high as $201.60 on Nov. 3.

The rise has given Mountain View, California-based Google a market value of $54 billion and an estimated price-to-earnings ratio of about 77, more than triple that of Cisco Systems Inc., whose equipment underpins much of the Internet that the Google name now dominates.

``The growth of the Internet will continue to propel their revenue as we go forward,'' said Alan Loewenstein, who manages $420 million at John Hancock Advisers Inc.'s technology fund in Garden City, New York. ``The business is doing very well, but the negative is the tremendous overhang on the stock.''

Scarcity of the shares may have contributed to the stock's rise after the Internet-based auction that helped set the IPO price. Google and investors sold 8.3 percent of the shares in the offering to raise $1.92 billion as the company fought Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for Web advertising dollars.

Google is introducing features to sustain its revenue growth from advertising linked to Web-search results, a $3.93 billion market in the U.S. That market probably grew 55 percent this year, according to David Hallerman, senior analyst at researcher eMarketer Inc. in New York.

Microsoft shares have dropped 2.1 percent this year, while Yahoo has gained 70 percent.

Revenue and Profit Growth

Growth in ad sales and Internet users more than doubled Google's third-quarter sales and profit, according to its first earnings report as a public company in October.

Google would have earned 70 cents a share in the third quarter, excluding stock-based compensation and a $201 million charge against earnings to settle a legal dispute with Yahoo, CIBC World Markets analyst Michael Gallant said Oct. 22. That compared with an average estimate of 56 cents from 17 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said at the time that he saw no evidence that the market for search-engine advertising is slowing, and that the ``limitations on our growth have pretty much been internal.''

Price Concern

Of 25 analysts tracked by Bloomberg, 13 rate Google stock ``buy,'' 11 ``hold'' and one ``sell.''

Loewenstein said his fund has sold its Google stake because the price may fall after the final so-called lockup period ends in February and more than 176.8 million shares become available.

An earlier lockup, which forbids Google employees and other insiders from selling its shares, expired on Dec. 16. That increased the amount of stock available by 24.9 million shares, or 38 percent. The next-to-last lockup expires next month and the final one in February will more than double the number of shares available.

That doesn't deter all potential buyers of Google shares. Advancements in search technologies will integrate the Internet deeper into everyday life, and Google plays a key role in adding functions that make personal computers more productive, Caris & Co. analyst David Garrity said.

``The frontiers of search are being pushed out rapidly,'' Garrity, in New York, wrote to clients yesterday. He rates Google shares ``buy'' and doesn't own them.

Brewing Fight

Google this month announced a program to put books from four libraries on the Web, a move designed to lure Internet surfers away from services run by Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft's MSN.

Yahoo, owner of the second-most-used search engine, developed its own Web-searching technology and stopped offering Google's search engine this year. Yahoo also has started competing with Google to sell ads next to search results.

Microsoft introduced its own search engine in November. The quality of its results was ``in the same league'' as Google's, Chris Sherman, president of consulting firm Searchwise in Boulder, Colorado, said at the time.

Companies spent $7.3 billion on all forms of Internet advertising last year, a 21 percent increase from 2002, according to the New York-based Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Internet advertising revenue totaled about $7 billion for the first nine months of this year and may rise to more than $8 billion by yearend, the trade group said in November.