Google's extraordinary rise has continued with the company's shares rocketing past $500, turning its employees into millionaires and locking its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin into multi-billionaire status.
All the more extraordinary, coming just two years after it floated at $85. But then, Google's very name symbolises its towering ambition. It's a play on googol, the word for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
But the question is this: how big does it get before people start seeing Google as evil? Remember Google's philosophy: "You can make money without doing evil".
You avoid being evil by finding partners, Google insiders told the Keith McArthur at the Globe and Mail.
The aim, using this logic, is for everyone to get rich along with Google, thereby avoiding the kinds of problems that confronted Microsoft in the 90s when it established its near monopoly.
Still, McArthur makes the point that when you do a Google search for "evil Google" you get 53 million results. Yeah, I tried that and that was the number I got. Lots of stuff about doing evil by co-operating with the Chinese Government's censorship. Then I try it today, and I get 28 million. I'm still trying to work out what happened to the other 25 million sites?
This week’s 219th edition bears a Thanksgiving theme, even though Thanksgiving has come and gone. I personally feel that thanks is something we should give all through the year.
The name Google isn’t a play on words. -.- They got the name when a friend/colleague misspelled (obviously) the word googol.