Greetings fellow Googolers,

This is the first in a series of daily memos I'll use to let you in on important developments inside and outside the Googolplex.

And let me say that I'm tickled to death to use this inaugural edition to talk about a really dumb move by one of our rivals.

In case you haven't heard, Microsoft has started PAYING PEOPLE to use their LiveSearch service. If anyone needed better evidence on how inferior their search product is, our friends up in Redmond just gave them a whopper.

And I thought they were desperate when they tried to buy Yahoo (for $45 billion)!

While some have written that this could force us to eventually do the same, and some of our own engineers have expressed that concern (gosh, I love the way you guys love this company), let me assure you that's as far outside the realm of possibility as either Larry, Sergey or me doing evil.

You know, Microsoft pulled this sort of thing before, when they gave away their browser and used it to crush Netscape, whose browser was much more elegant and stable than what we used to call Internet Exploder.

Let me assure you, Googolers, things will be different this time. We've got deep pockets, a huge market share lead and, let's be honest, we're just smarter about search.

So have no fear of Microsoft's marketing dollars. All this tells me is that we've got them on the run.

Yours in the algorithm,

Erik