Google Gets Dissed

Standard & Poor's blew it. With Gillette bowing out of the popular S&P 500 index over the weekend because of the shaving giant's absorption into the Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) bloodstream, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) was the logical replacement. It had the momentum. It had the brand. It had the market cap.

But it wasn't enough. Instead, Lennar (NYSE: LEN) will fill the vacancy. Now, I have nothing against Lennar. The homebuilder has been on a tear lately. It's been toppling profit targets faster than it's been erecting new digs. And it has a healthy backlog of home orders to fill. In fact, Lennar is many things. But it's not Google.

Google is the undisputed leader in online advertising, with $4.4 billion rung up on that front over the past year. It is the Internet's most valuable company, pegged with an $88 billion price tag. It's a travesty, with laggards like Janus, Applied Micro Circuits, and JDS Uniphase (Nasdaq: JDSU) loafing around in the 500-room inn, that Google should be looking in from the outside. That will change. Soon. But it should have happened over the weekend.

It's not as if the index was starving for homebuilders. Lennar is a $9 billion company, sure, but D.R. Horton (NYSE: DHI), Pulte (NYSE: PHM), and Centex (NYSE: CTX) are already figured in to the weighted average.

Regardless of whether you think Google is currently overvalued, it's still one of the country's most important companies. The fact that it's a fast-growing, dynamic knockout just adds some timely urgency to the S&P's bonehead failure in recognizing Google's market stature. At a time when so much commerce is making the move online, the S&P 500 chose to hand a warm set of keys to a company getting by on bricks and mortar.

Enjoy those concrete shoes, indexers.

Google is not an active recommendation in the Rule Breakers newsletter service, but it's got that offbeat approach to winning it all that seems to permeate many of the newsletter's picks. See what it's all about with afree 30-day trial to Rule Breakers.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz doesn't think he will ever get a room in the 500-room hotel, but he'll sneak a dip in the pool when no one is looking. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. Rick is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.