The Google monolith marches on....eMarketer reports that the search giant's share of online advertising should hit 25 percent this year and 30 percent next year. Can anyone stop it? Yahoo hasn't, although it's just released early - make that "less late than expected" - its Panama search-ad system. Ask.com, meanwhile, is getting rave reviews for its latest upgrade, but isn't reaping the ad dollars that typically follow, Virtual Economics notes.

When it comes to competition, Google doesn't have a lot to worry about. What should keep Sergey and Larry up at night, though, are their bungling employees. Look at Google Video - a $1.65 billion debacle given the price the company had to pay YouTube just to get in the game. Google's subpar attempts at non-search services have been amply documented: Orkut, Google Talk, Google Finance, Froogle, and other me-too products haven't gained traction. Even Gmail and Google Maps haven't unseated their top competitors.

On a less serious note, there's the "crafty chica" who works at Google and got the blogosphere worked up when she accidently posted a recipe for white-chocolate sugar skulls to the official Google Blogger blog instead of her personal blog. Hardly a marketplace disaster, but it raises questions about the intellectual capacity of Google's army of new recruits.