Even though Google
Tuesday, the company posted its third-quarter results. Revenues rose by 24%. (No, it's not as exciting as the 47% top-line spurt that Yahoo! produced or the 96% masterpiece painted by Google over the same three-month period.)
Earnings may have skyrocketed at Google and Yahoo! (before one-time items), but they dipped from $0.37 a share at InfoSpace last year to $0.32 per share this time around.
So why pay attention to InfoSpace? It's all about the value, chum. InfoSpace is looking to earn between $1.46 and $1.49 per share this year. Think you can buy Google or Yahoo! at 15 times earnings? In your dreams.
That's before you consider that the company's balance sheet is loaded with more than $10 a share in cash. That would drop the P/E to single digits, based on enterprise value. However, to be fair on that last point, you should discount the sizable interest income if you wanted to back out the cash entirely in your calculations.
InfoSpace provides value-minded investors exposure to both the promising search engine space and the mobile business. The latter is growing faster than InfoSpace's flagship search and directory stronghold, though mobile downloads have produced lower margins.
In InfoSpace, you have a proven entity at a reasonable price, one which may deserve your attention on more than a quarterly basis.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is glad to contribute a rare headline in InfoSpace's favor, though he does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of theRule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
