GOOGLE, the most widely used internet search engine, last night said that it plans to launch its long-awaited $2.7 billion (£1.5 billion) share offering imminently on New York’s Nasdaq market.

Despite heavy lobbying from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), America’s benchmark for blue chip companies, Google filed an application to list class A shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange and said that it hoped to launch the initial public offering (IPO) “as soon as practicable after the effective date of this registration statement”.

Nasdaq attracted the listing because it comprises more technology-based companies than the NYSE.

The IPO could be launched as early as this month, but Google has not yet decided on its “ticker” symbol — the abbreviation of its name used by traders to deal in the stock.

The company gave no indication of the price at which it would offer the shares, claiming only that the price would be determined by demand for class A shares. Industry experts expect the IPO to value the company at about $20 billion, with early signs showing that investors are very keen to acquire the stock.

The company has tried to present itself as the bastion of transparency and fairness after a wave of accounting scandals in the US corporate world that robbed small investors of their savings. There will be no preferred stock allocation for the rich or influential, and the shares will be offered online to the public.

In keeping with this philosophy, the prospectus for Google shares lists countless reasons why an investor should not buy its stock, under headings such as “Our stock price could decline rapidly and significantly”, and “We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!”.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Google controlled 39.4 per cent of the web-search market in February, while rival Yahoo! held 30.4 per cent. Bill Gates’s MSN had 29.6 per cent and AOL had 15.5 per cent.