Susan Wojcicki's big lieSusan Wojcicki, an early Google employee
and sister-in-law to founder Sergey Brin, is a liar. In a puff-
piece profile of Wojcicki and her Menlo Park house, whose garage
served as Google's first office, a USA Today reporter lazily
transcribes the claim that Wojcicki invented AdSense. AdSense,
of course, is the system that places Google ads on other
websites, and generates billions of dollars in revenue for
Google. But Wojcicki didn't invent it.  To be fair, Wojcicki
might have proposed the idea of serving up Google's keyword-
linked ads on other websites, targeting not search queries but
the contents of the page. "I love taking an idea ... to a
prototype and then to a product that millions of people use,"
Wojcicki told USA Today.  But here's where Wojcicki got caught
in a lie. AdSense was not a prototype that Wojcicki developed.
Instead, AdSense was the name of a product launched by Applied
Semantics, a Santa Monica, Calif. startup, in October 2002.
Google launched an AdSense copycat in