I’ll happily admit that I never noticed when Google.com was first registered. The official biography says 15 September, 1997. The company, Google Inc, wasn’t set up for another year. Coincidentally, that was around the same time as I found myself mocked at a public seminar for predicting that, within a decade, software would include advertising.

Today, there are plenty of “interactive marketing” companies offering expert sources for entrail-readings performed for the benefit of advertisers who want to know how to spend their AdWords budgets.

The thing is, I don’t seriously doubt that these oracles are sooth. I’m sure that – even if only for a period of one or two months while Google sorts itself out – they are capable of finding ways of moving your company name up the ladder, or cutting the costs of advertising. What amazes me is not that people try to do it but that there is such a complex technology behind it.

Google gave us a new word but it has also donated a technology complete with its own jargon. And “mining the keyword tail” may not be quite as exciting as the original discovery of integrated circuitry on silicon but I suspect it’s going to have every bit as much impact on our lives.