With all of the furor about Google and Microsoft it is easy to forget that the fabulous search engine giant started as a Stanford University PhD research seedling in 1999 and is a classic case of unbridled academic IP.

In 1998 Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-authored an academic paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" for journal Computer Networks. The rest, as they say, is history.

What do you get when you mix the UK's leading "bad science" columnist, an intrepid blogging professor, a lecturer and herbal medicine practitioner, the husband of a lecturer and herbal medicine practitioner, a classic blog-fearing university, and the angry voices of the multitudes in the blogosphere?

If it isn't obvious already, the answer is pure entertainment. So Blogscholar brings you a brief summary of the tale of this combustible mix.