Neil Moncrief couldn't afford to have a bad quarter. In fact, even a bad month made things a bit tense at home - running your own business is like that. When things go south at the office, you take it home with you. "It's not like working for the man, where you leave it at the office at five o'clock," he tells me in a soft southern drawl. As a small businessman in the southern US state of Georgia, Moncrief lives on the edge of profit and loss - a bad month means avoiding his local banker, putting off home and car payments, and having less meat on his family's table. But Moncrief is proud of what he has achieved. He built a small e-commerce company, survived the nuclear winter of 2001-2002, and emerged with enough cashflow to take care of his family.

Moncrief has search engines to thank for that cashflow, Google in particular. Thanks to the traffic that Google drove to Moncrief's online storefront, Moncrief no longer worked for the man. But as the holidays approached in 2003, Moncrief got a new boss. His name was Google, and he made old Ebenezer Scrooge look like a saint.