Some things do not, in fact, get worse

Google is up to a bunch of things at the moment. I'm slightly amused at Froogle, which is a product search for Google (does anyone remember that catalogue search they had briefly for a while? What happened to that?). But a bunch of people have been complaining that Google is getting too powerful - that it's becoming a monoculture, which is bad, because if your business depends on Google, and then Google bans you from its listing, you're in trouble. This New York Times article (via Google weblog sums it up, I think.

But the important thing is, it still works. While I was wandering around Google links, I came across The Register's take on the discovery that if you type "More evil than Satan himself" into Google, you get Microsoft. Nowadays, of course, if you type that into Google, you get news reports of the discovery that it used to link to Microsoft. I don't know whether this is a sign that Google is better at categorising news sites, that there are more news sites around these days, or just that the Internet is becoming increasingly self-referential.

But the thing that I liked was the end of the article - from 1999, back when Google was just becoming new.

And please, please don't tell anybody about google - it's wonderfully fast at the moment.

Wouldn't you know it - it still is. And the world is a better place as a result.id