Yesterday afternoon was an odd one for Google, Inc. (GOOG) stock and an embarrassing moment for the NASDAQ Exchange. We noted right away—as I am sure many in the investing community did—that GOOG was tanking right before the close. Around the office people began to wonder about hedge funds or other institutional investors liquidating their positions at the quarter end. We speculated that value investors would be drooling over Google at the quoted prices; depending on the source you trust, GOOG actually got down to $25.80 (CNN Money) or even one penny (Reuters)!

As it turns out, it was all much ado about nothing. It was a major glitch, as a spokeswoman for NASDAQ (NDAQ)explained, “A market participant sent in a large number of orders and drove the price down at approximately (3:57p.m. ET) which caused the bid-offer to be artificially low due to their mistake.” It’s funny that an exchange which is exclusively electronic would blame a participant for the mistake instead of the entity that allowed the trade to occur. Anyway, the erroneous trades are being wiped out and NASDAQ set the closing price of GOOG for September 30, 2008 at $400.52, slightly above where it began the day. Aren’t computers supposed to make market trading more efficient?

Back to reality, GOOG shares in the low $400 are too cheap to ignore according to our methodology. We, at Ockham Research, are huge fans of Google’s products which are indispensable to our daily workflow. Google is one of those iconic brands whose name has become a part of speech. One does not search the web anymore; it’s simply referred to as “googling”. Other brand names that come to mind which have entered the lexicon of business are Xerox and Tivo.

Google is now so much more than a search engine.