“The testing was conclusive that the more relevant results were outside the LookSmart listings,” Judy Redetzki, MSN’s head of search, told the industry website Search Engine Watch ( ).With that business gone, LookSmart looks a goner to analysts: MSN generated 65 per cent of its listings revenues and all of its licensing income in the second quarter of this year.So will Web searching turn clean? Adrian Cox, the chief executive of Ask Jeeves ( ), seems evasive on the point. Ask Jeeves has recently undergone a complete facelift aimed at helping people to shop, and doesn’t use paid inclusion, but he doesn’t seem to be ruling it out. What’s not clear is how many companies offer “paid inclusion” AOL uses Google, which doesn’t. One could say that this time Google has got its retaliation in first.

It has “mindshare”: its name is known to the public to a far greater extent than Netscape’s ever was. “Google” – meaning to “search for the name of (someone) on the Internet to find out information about them” – can be found in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.So now, Microsoft, the “800-pound gorilla” of computing is spending some of its $46bn cash reserves on developing new search technology. Yet the search landscape is, at present, not so simple as it might appear. It’s not just Google and a sometime-in-the-future Microsoft; there are a huge number of search engines scrapping for a slice of your attention.What’s not so well known is that many search engines (though not Google) use one of the dirtiest little secrets of the web – a method called “paid inclusion”. It’s an arrangement between companies touting products and the search engines: the companies pay to have their results pushed up the search results, even if their product isn’t germane or if other pages could reasonably be judged more relevant. The reason: Microsoft thinks that search engines are the key to future internet use. It’s building a Google-style functionality into Longhorn, its next operating system version.

The tales have begun to leak out that earlier this year Microsoft simply went along to Google and offered to buy it, for upwards of $10bn. And it is Crestor that will be, indirectly, in the spotlight at the AHA. Finally, there is the biggest growth industry of them all – the public sector. This may not be the most efficient way of providing public service, but it is what the country voted for. By chance more than design, growing public sector investment has also provided a powerful Keynesian antidote to the business downturn that has engulfed much of the private sector this past few years.So to return to the question, is it possible indefinitely to sustain a trade deficit of the magnitude announced yesterday? Well yes. The order book grew to £2bn, of which almost £1.8bn is accounted for by support services – now 75 per cent of group business. The search engine market just got a lot more vicious.