I guess I'm just annoyed that they publish these things when I'm asleep but I actually liked Paul Ford's The Banality of Google:
"Oh, and I almost forgot—after the first focus group, and this is true, Satan stayed after to get his $30 and then tried to tempt Google. He said, “Larry and Sergey, I will give you everything! I will give you a cluster of 100,000 Linux servers!”[1]The Google guys were like, “Linux servers, huh. That sounds cool.”
And Satan said, “I will give you an algorithm to rank pages based on links.” And they were like, “you totally read our minds! Did you go to Stanford?” And Satan said, “I will give you six years of press coverage by fawning, lazy journalists, and a million slavering blogger acolytes to command as you will.”
Now the Google guys were nodding. They were like, “whatever you need, Satan. We'll give interviews to pornographic magazines, sell ads to the world's worst polluters, whatever you want.” So Satan said, “To seal the deal, I will give you a new logo—one that does not look like half-digested fridge magnets!”
But Satan had miscalculated! Because the logo was Google's number one secret technological advantage, the one thing no one would ever think to copy: it was so bad that it always made their search look good, no matter what could happen. So they said, “begone, foul wyrm, destroyer of worlds!” Although they later invited him back as a consultant. And that is how Google became the Jennifer Lopez of the Internet. "
Sure there's Screenscraping the Senate and Converting XML to RDF.
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