One such person, Rosalind Gardner, took her interest in online dating services and turned it into a business that generated almost half a million dollars in revenue last year and should do even better this year.

The fact that she created this business without spending one dime on product development makes her story even more amazing.

Rosalind Gardner used to make her living as an air traffic controller, a job most people consider quite stressful.

After getting tired of swing-shift work, and though she had no product of her own to sell and needed to make money relatively quickly, Gardner decided to try her hand at selling on Internet.

What she did next might seem simple, but it started an online venture that would make every dot-com refugee from 1999 drool with envy.

Gardner logged on to OneAndOnly.com, an online dating service, and signed up as an associate or "affiliate". She said they were paying "healthy" commissions to any webmaster who wanted to refer paying customers to them.

Commonly called "affiliate programs," this setup enables entrepreneurs to create a business promoting other people's businesses and bypass entire product development and product testing phases.

In short, by selling through other people's affiliate programs, virtually anyone can set up a business online promoting almost any type of product or service.

Gardner created a website (101date.com), her storefront on Internet.

Though she created her own website pages, she suggests that an effective way to get started even faster is to go to dollartemplates.com or 4templates.com, buy a website template for between $10-$30, and modify it to meet your needs.

"Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on website design," Gardner advises, "purchase an inexpensive website template for much less than cost of dinner and a movie!"

Gardner also kept content for her website simple, direct and effective. Though she wanted to appeal to widest possible audience, she kept focused on her narrow "niche" of online dating.

Evolution In past decade search has went from not existing, to general file matching, to machines so complex that few people understand how they work. As they evolve in complexity there will always be a new and better way restructure worlds largest data set. As old horses such as AltaVista limp toward extinction, now at 5, Google is a seasoned veteran in game.

Google has spent last year evolving from a search engine to a giant media corporation. At birth Google was worried about only one thing, search - and that focus is why it became successful. As Google spreads out many are wondering, are they doing it too fast? Are they letting quality slip? As any company evolves it will make mistakes, but has Google lost sight of its goals, or is it just following lifecycle of a search engine?

Google gained large distribution when Yahoo switched to it to drive down Inktomi stock price, only later to buy Inktomi at $1.65 a share. Google then came to power stealing traffic from Yahoo by providing clean, relevant results, and good search tools for surfers and webmasters alike. Many estimate that Google controls in excess of 75% of search market. The problem is, ideals that gave them this power appear to be fading.

The Competition Microsoft is still working on its search engine. Yahoo recently acquired Overture and is working behind closed doors in much same way as MSN is. LookSmart has not updated Wise Nut in a long time, is hated by a large portion of internet community, and is soon set to lose most of its distribution. And Ask Jeeves (owner of Teoma) has its top results powered by Google AdWords. With Google powering Yahoo, AOL and many other sites Google lacks a clear competitor today.

The Problems Facing Google Right now Google can take its huge lead and extend it, or let it slip. No system is perfect and there will always be complaints, but I have to wonder if Google has forgotten why or how it became such an icon.

Google grew to popularity by organizing web based on links. They used PageRank to perform an empirical analysis of web link structure. Many people have reported their Google Toolbar has been failing to return PageRank 90% of time. While hysteria around PageRank is somewhat overrated, it would be more assuring if feature worked often. In fact, it is not just toolbar which is broken.

As a search engine has its distribution grow, there are more and more people who desire to take their free money from it. Top Google listings may be worth thousands of dollars for some phrases. Over a year ago articles such as Google Degrades, Geek's Aghast appeared in top web magazines such as Wired. With few alternatives available many people get frustrated to see 404 error pages at top of search results.

Spammers create link networks to manipulate PageRank. The one biggest flaw with PageRank is that a link counts as a vote. A link is not always a vote.

Some types of information are generally link heavy. Weblogs, for example, generally consist of a short entry and a few links. This small entries are frequently created by people with a unique spin on world. After a few collogues link in, suddenly these ideas can be misrepresented as worldwide views. Natural blogging is not only idea degrading search results though.

Some blogs have software which leave inline comments (such as Movable Type). People can thus comment from a popular blog and parse PageRank through to their site. I am a longtime reader of Steven Berlin Johnson. He recently celebrated his "1 year blogiversery". He linked back to his original post and spammers responded kindly. Again his popularity has earned him more visits and entries by dubious Lolita and Mr Viagra. Software such as MT blacklist aim to stop this abuse, but widespread abuse is only a sign of weakness of search engines.

While dealing with this massive abuse, Google must find ways to pay for software, hardware, and engineers to power around 300,000,000 searches each and every day. With a distribution network that large, changes of any kind are not taken lightly.

AdSense Earlier search engines used metrics that ignored technological evolution and financial responsibility. They did not care if they lost money. While financials and technology have improved, one of biggest problems search engines face today is a lack of quality content on web.

Earlier this year Google introduced a program called AdSense which displays its pay per click AdWords ads on many mid sized web sites. AdSense was designed to help pay to produce better content sites (and thus, better search results). While still in infancy, AdSense program has made many flaws.

Soon after Google introduced AdSense they included a related searches link set underneath ads which made webmasters angry. This technique was siphoning off traffic from websites back to Google with no payment of any kind. Quickly Google had to repeal this move.

Google has also signed its AdSense members to a gagging clause. Beyond that gagging clause many have complained about getting kicked out for reasons they did not know, and could not even challenge. Then for these same members to see how much money Google had owed them up to that point they had to agree to another set of terms that prevented them from criticizing AdSense program. But ads get worse.