Russ Horowitz's Marchex (Nasdaq:MCHX) went public today. The IPO came out at $6.50 and closed at $8.88 (up 36.6% or $2.38 for the day). [I want to add that I purchased shares in Marchex today.]

Russ was the creator of Go2Net several years ago. Go2Net was sold to Infospace. Russ proved to be adept at acquiring and creating a variety of connected services at Go2Net.

Marchex is in the paid search business and has a variety of brands including A-HA and Enhance.

Marchex's availability on the market means that there are four (I believe) "pure" search companies that are public (findwhat.com, askjeeves, looksmart and mamma.com). Beyond these four we also have the public Yahoo-Overture and MSN that are directly involved in search, but whose respective businesses go into several other areas of information and technology. We can add InfoSpace to this latter category as well.

The successful offering of Marchex and the huge jump in value of mamma.com earlier this month will certainly spur Wall Street houses to bring out more IPOs in the search and paid search area.

One can only imagine what the first day offering of Google might bring! The prospective Google offering could easily trump Marchex's results by 5 times.