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Google Inc. shares roared past $500 (U.S.) for the first time Tuesday, highlighting a question that is being asked with increasing regularity: How big can Google get before people see it as evil?

It's an important public relations challenge for a company whose informal corporate mantra is “do no evil” as it expands into new and varied lines of business, both on and offline.

Do a Google search for “evil Google” and you get 53 million results. Some sites raise fears about all the information Google gathers and retains about its users.

Others question whether Google is becoming too dominant in too many areas.

“Being evil — I think that's all fun and interesting to talk about and [there are] a lot of theories about it. But the concept of the company really is to be a better partner and enable users to find what they're looking for,” says Penry Price, Google's director for eastern sales in North America.

Mr. Price says Google doesn't want to be seen as the next Microsoft Corp., which garnered a reputation in the late nineties as a corporate bully because of its near monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems.

One of the ways the search engine hopes to avoid such a fate is to grow through partnerships, Mr. Price says.

The hope is that if everybody else gets rich along with Google, people won't be as concerned about the company's dominance.

“People think of us as doing things that aren't our core competencies, but we are trying to become an enabler.... We want a lot of people to make a lot of money,” says Mr. Price, who was in Toronto last week to brief the city's ad agencies on what Google is up to — a growing circle of activities that now extends beyond the Internet and into traditional media.

For example, instead of buying MySpace, or trying to develop a better MySpace, Google entered a $900-million advertising deal with the youth-focused social networking portal.

(By contrast, Google did pay $1.6-billion for YouTube.)

Google, which collects an estimated 25 per cent of all U.S. Internet ad revenue, is no longer satisfied with ruling the Web. The company is now experimenting with selling ad space in newspapers and radio.

Mr. Price says the foray into traditional media is a natural evolution for a company in the business of getting people the information they need when they need it, while monetizing that relationship by delivering them to advertisers.

“People aren't just online,” Mr. Price says. “They're going to be reading their paper on the beach. They're going to be watching television somewhere at nighttime. They're going to be on their cellphone. They're going to be on Google Maps to figure out directions to go to a certain restaurant.

“The concept is that if we can be there wherever anybody is at any point in time — it's a very grandiose ambition of course — but we could serve a relevant message to that person wherever they are, whenever they're looking for it.”

By reinventing the economics of online advertising, Google has seen its shares climbing steadily since they made their debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Aug. 19, 2004, with an initial public offering price of $85.

Tuesday, Google shares closed up $14.60 at $509.65

Google's strength, Mr. Price says, is that it has provided online advertisers with the tools to track and measure if their ads are working. The company's great ambition is to take those tools and apply them to other forms of media.

Take newspapers. Google recently partnered with 50 major U.S. papers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, to sell ad inventory on their pages.

Until it can invent a more reliable way to measure return on investment through newspaper ads, Google will use its Web search results as a proxy. If an ad causes three times more people to Google the sponsor, it is probably more effective than an ad that shows no incremental searching.

One ad agency executive, who listened to Mr. Price's presentation last week, says he was amazed at how many different activities Google is involved in.

Peter Bolt, a partner and planner at advertising agency john st., says that as long as the company maintains its focus on the customer, it should be able to avoid having the evil moniker cast upon it.

“They get the consumer experience right first and then find a way to monetize it afterwards ...” he says.

“That philosophy mitigates my concerns that ‘Big Google' will take over.”