Today marks the six year anniversary of Google's IPO. How do Google's first six years as a public company stack up against tech giants Apple and Microsoft?

As you can see below, Microsoft's stock was an amazing rocket in its first six years. Apple's was not, doing slightly worse than Google's.

Obviously, there's caveats when comparing stock prices. When Google went public, it was a more mature business than when Microsoft went public.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on Google's six year anniversary of being public, the only thing the tech world cares about is Facebook Places. Sort of an omen, no?

 “If I were a president…”  project for Amusement Magazine.

SEATTLE — Apple has surpassed Microsoft as the largest technology company in the world by market capitalization.

Apple's move comes as the company's iPhone, and now its iPad tablet computer, have taken on more of the personal computing tasks once handled by computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system and other programs. Market cap is the dollar value of a company's outstanding shares. On Wednesday, Apple Inc.'s shares slipped $1.11 to close at $244.11, making its market cap about $222 billion. But Microsoft Corp.'s stock fell $1.06, or 4.1 percent, to close at $25.01, for market cap of about $219 billion. The only U.S. business with a higher market value is Exxon Mobil Corp. The oil company's market cap is about $279 billion, based on Wednesday's closing price of $59.31.

As noted in the chart above, Google controls the traditional search engine market by a wide berth. (comScore doesn't yet track mobile search data.) More than 97% of Google's revenue comes from search ads, and with computing and search going increasingly mobile, Google has been eager to make itself indispensible in the mobile market, also.

Contrary to Job's assertion, for the vast majority of smartphone owners, Google search is by far the leading search service.

Mobile ads will bring in an estimated $500 million in revenue for Google this year, according to Caris and Co. analyst Sandeep Aggarwal. That is "perhaps the fastest growing revenue line" for Google, Aggarwal wrote in a research note Monday. Aggarwal also adds that there are a couple challenges along the mobile road for Google. For one, Google's dominance of search means that each mobile search is -- cannibalistically-speaking -- one less desktop search. Second, apps on phones bypass Google search. But Google has hasn't exactly been a coasting on its desktop success. The push into smartphone operating systems with its Android three years ago has been the Trojan horse of Google mobile search. By contrast, Microsoft's(MSFT) disappearance from mobile hasn't been particularly helpful to the mobile adoption of its Bing. And Yahoo!(YHOO) has fumbled badly in mobile search.

Google has tried to move beyond the classic browser-based searches in mobile. For example, many Google Android phones, particularly the Verizon(VZ) Incredible and Droid line, have included free Navigation software that combines GPS, Google search and maps for turn-by-turn directions. Google has also honed its verbal searches, so users can speak their search terms rather than type them for surprisingly accurate results. Google's pending $750 million deal for in-application advertising shop AdMob stands to give the search giant a big piece of the mobile advertising market more targeted to display than search. Maybe too big though -- the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the deal.

"Applications are an opportunity for Google," said Sullivan, who points out that Google doesn't have specialized search engines for information on things like restaurants. Outfits like Urbanspoon and Yelp have loads of restaurant data, like menus and reviews, all in one place.

"Applications are a threat, but not a big threat," said Sullivan. "People are always looking for the Google killer. I call applications the Google killerettes. They take a slice at Google in various ways."

--Written by Scott Moritz in New York.