To be honest, I was sure the Times would win. But I'm enjoying Cadenhead's assessment that Wikipedia wins the bet — isn't that the sort of twist any Webhead would want? Cadenhead has exposed the flaw in my genius idea: I presumed there were only two sides. That's journalist math. Any real techie knows there are never only two values to anything in real life. Even the 1's and 0's inside your CPU depend on where you draw the line between a 0 and a 1. Part of what makes the Internet so fascinating is it constantly proves there are potentially infinite outcomes to any story.

Mayer's admission also destroys another myth spun by Google PR: That Susan Wojcicki deserves credit for AdSense, the current name for Google's content-matching system. In July, I exposed that as a lie by pointing out that AdSense was a product acquired by Google, not something Wojcicki came up with in a brainstorm. Google ur-spokesman David Krane, at the time, countered that by telling CNBC that Wojcicki "directed and invented" Google's in-house version of AdSense, which launched after the real AdSense but before Google acquired the company that made it.

Now we know the full truth: Paul Buchheit invented what Google now calls AdSense — not Wojcicki, and certainly not Mayer, who can only claim that she didn't try harder to stop it. Of course, it's convenient, politically, for Krane and others to credit Wojcicki. She is, after all, Google cofounder Sergey Brin's sister-in-law.