NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's finally over -- the worst initial public offering freeze since Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony (Do the hustle!) ruled the pop charts.

So three cheers for iPayment, which broke the cold spell Monday with the first IPO in nearly two months. The last time the market went that long without a new offering was a stretch ending in September, 1975.

But despite the success of the iPayment deal (it gained more than 30 percent in its debut), I think it's highly unlikely that private tech companies will be shaking their groove thing any time soon. What the sector needs now (beside love, sweet love of course) is a Google IPO.

Rumors of an imminent IPO filing have been starting to percolate ever since CNN/Money Contributing Writer Adam Lashinsky broke the news in Fortune last month that Google had hired former CSFB e-commerce analyst Lise Buyer as a "director of business optimization." The tech community interpreted this as a fancy name for Wall Street liaison.

But at a J.P. Morgan tech conference last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reaffirmed the search-engine company's long-held stance that it isn't planning to go public.

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I hope Google doesn't resist much longer. Even though Google has prospered, and doesn't seem to need the public markets, its IPO would be just the kick in the pants the tech sector needs.

Although Google does not talk about its finances in great detail, Schmidt has said that Google is profitable. And various revenue estimates for 2002 range from $100 million to $300 million, with estimates for this year jumping to a range of $400 million-to-$700 million.

"Google would be a blockbuster IPO. Google can price a lot like a traditional company since it has high margins and tremendous growth," said Bob Gold, president and CEO of Ridgewood Capital, a Ridgewood, N.J.-based venture capital firm.

In fact, this IPO famine reminds me a lot of the summer of 1998. Tech stocks, along with the rest of the market, were reeling due to concerns about a debt crisis in Russia and the implosion of the hedge fund firm Long-Term Capital Management.

The IPO market dried up until eBay ended a 28-day drought when it went public Sept. 24.

EBay was just what the market needed: an offering from a quality company. EBay already was profitable ... long before investors cared about such trivial things. The stock surged 163 percent on its first day of trading. (Those were the days.)

Of course, eBay begat gobs of IPO fluff, most of which are dead or dying. Remember Xoom.com, Internet America, and theglobe.com? But eBay's success also made it easier for several legitimate tech and media companies to go public.

News Corp. sold a stake of Fox Entertainment to the public in November 1998. Ticketmaster Citysearch, now a part of Barry Diller's USA Interactive, had its IPO in December. And graphics chip maker nVidia went public in January 1999.

To be sure, times have changed since 1998. That summer's slowdown was just a temporary blip in a more than decade's long bull market that finally crashed spectacularly in March 2000. The Wall Street IPO spinning scandal hasn't helped either.

And Gold said that there isn't a major tech trend like the Internet that has Silicon Valley buzzing. He thinks when the IPO market does recover, private semiconductor companies focusing on broadband as well as software, chip and security firms with a wireless emphasis will probably be in demand.

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Still, other IPO watchers think that Google is not needed for the IPO market to recover. "All the tech cognoscenti are waiting for Google but that's not the only game in town," said Kathy Smith, research analyst with Renaissance Capital, an independent IPO research firm that runs the IPO Plus Aftermarket fund.

Smith points out that there are three tech IPOs on tap for June: home networking company Netgear, audio technology developer Digital Theater Systems, and Accpac, an accounting software spinoff of the troubled Computer Associates.

These offerings may perform well, but none will be enough to quicken the average investors' pulse. Until a Google search for "Google IPO" generates links to stories about an actual filing instead of more speculation, the tech IPO market will remain as dead as Disco Duck.