s guidance suggesting the higher price range but that there isn't an official new price range. Yandex's offering follows the successful debut last week of U.S. social media company LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), which more than doubled on its first day of trading. Although Yandex is a search engine rather than a social media company, IPO investors in general have been interested in Internet plays this year, with the best first-day performance coming from Chinese firm Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd. (QIHU), (the stock has since given back some of its first-day gains). Like Qihoo, Yandex dominates a market that is at an earlier stage of Internet adoption than the U.S., which offers more growth potential. The Russian company's IPO is "more than 10 times oversubscribed," the person close to the deal said. John Connor, portfolio manager at the Third Millennium Russia Fund, whose fund plans to buy into the IPO, said he attended a presentation in Boston where potential buyers seemed to have no reservations about indicating their interest in the deal. "I didn't get the feeling that there was any unfamiliarity with the company or its products, or any skepticism either," said Connor, the former president of Russia-based web mail service Mail.ru Group Ltd. (MAIL.LN). He remains an officer and director at Mail.ru, which Yandex considers its principal domestic competitor in several of its services. Yandex, the largest Internet company in Russia by revenue, generated 64% of all 2010 search tr against the content that users surface about themselves. If a baby store in Salt Lake City wants to put ads in front of--and only in front of--women aged 25-35 living within 10 miles of the city, Facebook can do that for them, based on the information users enter about themselves. Facebook makes a lot of money from offering this service. This year alone it is expected to reel in over $4 billion in advertising. And that money is what enables Facebook to keep building features that serve its mission. Google says it has a completely different mission: To--and again, verbatim--“organize the world’s information.” Which they do largely by constructing complex algorithms that enable it to serve up extremely good results to any user’s search query, but also by providing other information-related tools, like Google Maps, Google Street View, and Google Earth. But to fulfill this mission, Google needs to have access to the world’s information (simillar in a way to Facebook's need for you to not only share but share through Facebook). And to do that, information needs to flow freely. So much so that this has become a core philosophical tenet for the company. And Google feels so strongly about this that it has been willing to ruffle feathers by, on occasion, trying to make information flow more freely than some owners of said information would sometimes like it to. (For example, see the ever-ongoing Google Books lawsuit.) In the meantime, however, Google, like Facebook, supports its mission by selling ads, primarily ads against search results (aka: information organized) and through its ad network which places ads on millions of other websites. And these revenues, in turn, enable the company to continue pursuing its mission to organize the world’s information. In theory, it would seem the two companies’ philosophies would be able to live happily side by side. Over here, you have a company that, if you take them at face value, wants to help people connect to one another, and over there you have a company that wants to organize the world’s information. What’s to fight about? A lot, as it turns out. Google fulfills its mission--and makes its nut--by sending bots out over the Internet, finding what information is out there, indexing it for easy retrieval when people run searches, and then running ads against those search results. With the rise of Facebook, however, an increasing amount of information sits behind a closed wall, one that Google’s bots can’t penetrate. This, of course, drives Google crazy. It’s a direct affront to its core philosophy--that information should be free, or, put a better way, free-flowing. So much so that last year, in response to Facebook’s refusal to provide a way for users to extract their information from their accounts, Google blocked Facebook from enabling its users to import Gmail contacts. “We have a data liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users,” Google said in a statement, noting that many other sites similarly permit import and export. “Sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end,” the statement continued. Hence, the company said, “we will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts … unless they allow similar export to other sites.” Facebook did not, and so Google's drawbridge went up. This week’s fiasco constitutes a similar skirmish, but in reverse. A little more than a year ago, Google introduced a feature called “Social Circle” available to users with Gmail accounts. When a Gmail user runs a search in Google, the results can include information culled from the Gmail user’s primary contacts, but also from “secondary contacts,” or friends of those primary contacts. Facebook appears to have told The Daily Beast that the whisper campaign that has now blown up in its face was spurred by concern that Google was culling at least part of that secondary contact information from data on Facebook. But what might have been a move to protect a competitive advantage--Facebook owns the preeminent social network and would prefer Google not build one to compete with it--was cloaked in a philosophical attack: Google was purportedly violating consumer privacy. (It’s not clear at this point whether Google was, or is.) And similarly, last year, as Google tried to protect a competitive advantage of its own, it lobbed philosophical attacks. Facebook wasn’t playing according to the principles of a free Internet, Google asserted, and so the network was penalized. In the months and years ahead, we will likely see more and more such philosophical attacks lobbed to and fro. And in each case, there will be an element of truth to the attacks: Facebook doesn’t always share with the rest of the Internet. True. Google gathers information which others sometimes claim it’s not entitled to. True. But part of what will be motivating the behavior of each company--and their attacks--won’t only be commonplace mudslinging between competitors. Rather, there will also be a fair dollop on each side of genuine indignation and