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At press time, Microsoft and Google are still going at it hot and heavy to win an important search advertising partnership with AOL. Once upon a time, the interests in that tussle would have been clearer: Microsoft was the evil corporate empire looking to dominate the digital world at the desktop and beyond, while Google was the beloved rebel alliance that wanted to catalog all the Web's knowledge and offer it up for free, maybe making a few bucks in the process.

Now, however, Google is firmly entrenched as the dominant force in search ads, poised (and perhaps willing) to leverage that power in areas beyond online marketing. So watching the pair scrap over the AOL audience is a little like being a citizen of Tokyo watching Godzilla go 10 rounds with Mothra. You're not totally sure you want either of them to win, because they're both pretty scary and unpredictable. All you know for sure is that by the time the fight's over, the neighborhood's going to be pretty busted up.

As it comes to dominate the Internet, both through search ads and features designed to draw and hold the users who view those ads, Google — that wacky little start-up that grew from two grad students and an idea into the Company That Saved the Internet for Venture Capital — has been hearing more jeers and fewer cheers lately from a wide range of online players. That's not a comfortable position for the company whose motto is “Don't Be Evil.”

It started with the French, who objected to Google's plan to digitize some of the great English-speaking libraries of the world. OK, they're French; that explains a lot. But then the publishers and authors being digitized got into the act, protesting copyright infringement. Still, if you weren't an author or publisher, you probably didn't much mind.

But lately, the rapid pace and bewildering array of innovation at the Mountain View, CA-based search engine — not to mention the boatload of capital from its public offering and record ad revenue — have elicited equal measures of admiration and panic among the Internet players Google touches. And it's becoming apparent that they mean to do a lot of touching.

Some of these innovations have the traditional end of the advertising spectrum in a dither. Old-school agencies see their clients' ad dollars flowing from mass media and offline into Web ads, including pay-per-click, searchable video and online directories. Realtors and newspapers are up in arms that Google Base could poach from their classified ads and listing services. Google also is talking about selling print ads for some of its pay-per-click clients. And phone companies are watching to see where Google goes with its IP voice “click to call” services now being tested in some U.S. markets.

In conferences attended over the last few months, I've heard more stories about friction between Google and advertisers and their search marketing firms. During AdTech New York in November, Barbara Coll, founder and CEO of optimization firm WebMama, ended her optimization presentation with a warning that advertisers should not count on Google keeping its natural search rankings free forever.

“How much longer can we consider organic traffic free? Google could decide tomorrow to charge for it; they could make paid inclusion happen instantly,” she said. Whether Google (like Yahoo!) would charge to include pages in its results, given its historic regard for relevance, is another issue. But it's an interesting cautionary note to point out that it could.

Cracks also are showing up in the relations between Google and the search marketing firms and agencies that buy ads. At December's Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, I talked to several executives at SEM firms who said (off the record) they knew Google had been paying sales calls on some of their biggest clients. The purpose of the calls, I was assured, was to suggest that these advertisers eliminate the middleman and place their ads directly with Google.

The SEM executives who relayed these stories weren't so much angry — they can hardly afford to be — as anxious that the company they relied on for so much of their clients' results was forcing them to keep justifying their existence. And they sounded as if they'd been made newly aware that they had a new and potentially dangerous direct competitor.

Ironically, Microsoft may come off as the good guy in this instance by beefing up MSN Search as the third engine and offering targeting tools the other engines still don't have. After all, a triumvirate is 50% better than a duopoly.