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.

Both men came from academic backgrounds; Brin was the son of a mathematician and an economist while Page's parents both taught Computing Science at Michigan State.  Now that each is worth an estimated $16 billion, they may find time to go back and finish their PhD dissertations which are both currently "on leave".  Whether they do or not, Google remains one of the most influential technologies in academia. And it is really quite incredible how powerful this indexing of human knowledge has become. Is Google Evil (ask Google)?

Privacy International performed a fascinating study of the privacy standards of many of the major Web 2.0 players. Google attacked the study not because of any issues with the stated privacy concerns (Google finished last in the study) but because one of 70 advisors to the non-profit was connected to Microsoft. Meanwhile the company has responded to calls from the academic community to exclude advertisements from essay selling companies online.

Google is like a powerful drug, addictive for any user to the point where reason is suspended. It is so useful we don't really care how it works or what it does. It is not to say that academia faces any fears of Google but instead that we must invest our energies in research and ideas, not excluding the libraries of the future. Has Google, like Facebook, reached a tipping point (or even deeper)? Or is it time for us to go back to school.