Google exemplifies many of the best things about the Web. It even catalogues and copies the best things about the Web—and the worst things too. Its founders are self-mocking academics with a brilliantly simple idea, who hire hordes of PhD graduates to keep refining that idea in a never-ending race against nutters of every kind: Scientologists, porn spammers and 'Bloggers. Google runs open source software. It has a sense of humour. It has the best philosophy of any dotcom yet:

“You can make money without doing evil.”

(a philosophy I enthusiastically and expensively subscribed to before the company existed). Lastly, and most importantly, Google works.

Now Google is also big enough to attract bullies and bloodsuckers.

Since it noticed the Internet about thirty years too late, Microsoft has been infesting this new sales territory with worms (crawling through the holes in its software); with its ugly, non-standard additions to the languages of the Net; and with patches to fix bugs in its products. Recently the company has decided it wants a piece of Google's action.

Neater, though, I think, is that the pure, rational, goodness of Google should be challenged by the cloying, touchy-feely gibberish of the Googles. According to an article by Amy Doolittle in the Washington Times, the Googles are

“fictional creatures from the land of Goo … sent on a special mission to planet Earth where they help children learn about wellness, self-esteem and the environment. They also sell merchandise.”

With their public offering coming up, Google's people will probably want to reach some reasonable out-of-court agreement with their rivals.

I say set the attack lawyers on them. I want to see the four-eyed Googles and their garish, Flash-infested, politically correct nest of rancid HTML go down hard. Let the day-glo blood of the Googles flow like Sunny Delight!