Without missing a beat, Schmidt responded, "We don't really know."

Really? Google is the information company, the house of genius engineers who have boldly vowed to bring order to the gray goo of information on the Internet -- and who have done an astonishingly good job of delivering on that promise so far. Yet Schmidt was asking investors to accept the notion that Google didn't even know how many of its ads were coming from longtime Internet advertisers vs. offline advertisers.

Schmidt, who along with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin makes up Google's so-called triumvirate, then launched into a soft-shoe routine about how "people think of Google as an advertising company, but we're really about return on sales." It was at once meaningless -- which company isn't about return on sales? -- and emblematic of Google's insistence on greeting Wall Street with a shrug.

For now, Wall Street isn't objecting. After all, who is going to complain about a company whose revenue more than doubled and whose profit grew sevenfold in its most recent quarter?

Google has explicitly encouraged investors to take a long-term view. Yet its tendency to withhold information relevant to shareholders is a long-term concern. When a crisis hits Google -- as it has every other tech giant, from Microsoft to Intel, from Amazon.com to eBay, from AOL to WorldCom -- investors who have endured Google's silence in good times will find it hard to shake off the feeling they're not getting the full story.

"It's not an issue right now because they're blowing through their numbers. [But] Wall Street will clamor for transparency when there's a negative," says an institutional investor who asked not to be named and whose fund bought Google shares in the IPO. "If I had a company with similar financials that gave more transparency, would I pay a premium for it? Yes, I would."

There's nothing wrong with Google challenging what many startups regard as the tyranny of investment banks in the underwriting process. The shareholder "Owner's Manual" that Google inserted at the start of its prospectus was the stuff of legend -- an inspiring blow for tech companies that, although profitable, find the yoke of quarterly earnings and operating margins hurt their ability to invest in innovation and plan for long-term growth. It was the first Securities and Exchange Commission filing to include the words "Don't Be Evil" -- Google's rallying cry. "We will not shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects because of short-term earnings pressure," the S-1 read, causing a thousand entrepreneurs' hearts to skip a beat.

But in playing Blutarsky to Wall Street's Dean Wormer, Google has gone too far. Many of the investors the company looks down on are also loyal users of the search engine. They are the same investors Google stood up for when it insisted on a Dutch auction IPO. Do they suddenly become evil once they log on to their Ameritrade accounts? Should they be denied the degree of fundamental information they are used to receiving from the other companies in which they invest?

Google refuses to offer any guidance on its earnings numbers, although it's easy to understand why: Guiding investors to profit estimates is like the board game Go -- the rules sound simple enough but turn out to be devilishly complex. Google's response, though, is to address the right problem with the wrong solution. Withholding guidance makes a stock more volatile ahead of an earnings report.

"It's not that people need to be spoon-fed guidance, but getting those numbers allows for fuller expectations of the company," says Mark Mahaney, an analyst at American Technology Research, which does no underwriting for companies. "If you don't have visibility, it generally makes you a little more cautious about the stock."

To see how loath Google is to share information, consider a story that appeared recently in GQ. Written by longtime Silicon Valley journalist John Heilemann, the piece began with an amusing anecdote about Page sitting in a plate of creme fraiche before offering new evidence that Google doesn't quite get what it means to be a public company.

Heilemann took a tidbit that appeared in The New York Times a year ago -- that Intuit Chairman and Apple board member Bill Campbell was hired as a Google consultant -- and put it in perspective. Several people quoted, including Google backer Michael Moritz, considered Campbell Google's hero and savior -- a mentor to the triumvirate through a period of rapid growth. CEO Schmidt told the magazine, "Our basic strategy is to invite him to everything."

A Google spokesman confirmed that Campbell is a consultant, but declined further comment for the record.

Securities laws require companies to disclose any person who performs policymaking functions, whether a formal officer or not. Campbell was only an adviser on managing Google's growth, albeit a powerful one. So he was likely not making any policy decisions at the company. Securities attorneys interviewed said such an arrangement would probably be legal, although very unusual.

Google investors, of course, welcomed the news about Campbell's role -- he is one of the most admired tech executives around. Which raises a question for Google's triumvirate: What's so bad about full disclosure? Not as in proprietary technology or future business strategies, but as in responding to such basic investor-type questions about who's mentoring its leaders, what its financial expectations are, how individual initiatives are faring, and where it's investing the money it raised in its IPO.

Sadly, those weren't the kinds of things Google wanted to talk about at its first-ever analysts' day last month, when the company once again took glee in blowing dirt up Wall Street's nose. The CFO, George Reyes, did appear, but only as a sort of emcee for the day. Google's CFO would make no presentation, but in a clever sleight of hand, Google's chef did. Get it? That one was so funny I almost fell over into my creme fraiche. Still, a company is opening the door to some dangerous puns when it delivers a cook instead of an accountant.

In other ways, Google delivered an unconventional presentation for analysts: Lots of stuff on the history of tech companies and the Internet as extension of the brain, not too much on all that hard math. To be fair, Reyes discussed some financials on an earnings call a week earlier, but companies customarily use analysts' days to give more numbers, not fewer. Instead, investors heard vague comments from Schmidt like, "We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." Great, what about the other way around?

Google's silence encourages the kind of faith-based investing that proved deadly in the last few years, an arguably reckless approach then and now. But unlike those greedy dot-coms, Google's logic implies that it's Wall Street that is evil -- all silk suits and slumped shoulders, tittering as they rob widows and step on kittens for fun. But let's say its investors awoke to their shame and gave their shares back to Google. Would the world be any better off?

Probably not. Beneath Google's attitude toward Wall Street lies petulance that Google had to go public -- not just to pay off venture investors but because private companies need to disclose financials once they have more than 500 investors (which Google did in 2004, thanks to employee options). If Page and Brin were really serious about not playing the guidance game, they could have stayed private. But that would have meant all the transparency of a public company without any of the financial perks.

In other words, Page, Brin and Schmidt have no problem holding a collective $17 billion stake thanks to Google's public status, but they will do everything they can to keep other shareholders from seeing how the sausage is made. And yet on Wall Street, as elsewhere, increased transparency has proven a virtue time and again.

It's Google's fabulous joke on the rest of us: The company making the world's information "universally accessible" won't allow you to have much information about itself. So let's name Google's holy trinity for what it is: a bunch of hypocrites. Genius hypocrites. Unconventional hypocrites. Revolutionary hypocrites. But hypocrites all the same.

For Google, if for nobody else, hypocrisy isn't necessarily evil.