It will be very interesting to see how Wall Street reacts when Google (GOOG) reports its fourth quarter earnings in late January. If the company exceeds estimates for the second time in as many quarters since its IPO, investors will have to decide why they are assigning Google a lower valuation than its chief competitor, Yahoo! (YHOO). Despite the fact that Google's total sales and growth rate will likely both pass those of Yahoo! in 2005, GOOG shares trade at 51x 2005 estimates, versus 76x for YHOO. Google's market value is also more than $5 billion less than Yahoo as I write this.

It seems that the common knock against Google (that it relies too much on paid search and is not as diversified as Yahoo!) could actually help it outgrow the competition next year and beyond. Google's G-Mail email service is still being finalized before it will be made available to everyone (users now need a referral to sign up for an account). Other new services such as blog hosting (BlogSpot) and shopping (Froogle) are just in the beginning stages of deployment. Conversely, Yahoo! has been diversifying away from search for years (through acquisitions like HotJobs and Broadcast.com).

It is for this reason that I think Google has a better chance than Yahoo! of beating analyst sales and profit estimates going forward. They simply seem to have more avenues for growth since they have been fairly narrow in their focus on search until recently. More upside potential combined with a 2005 price-earnings ratio a full 33 percent lower than Yahoo! makes Google shares look very intriguing going into the new year.

If a long position in Google is a bit too speculative for some investors (understandable given that we are still dealing with a 51 forward p/e), a paired trade of long GOOG and short YHOO can take advantage of any closing of the valuation gap, with much less day-to-day equity price volatility.