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The Queen might consider herself as having the last laugh, however. Not only does the Royal Channel have the all-time record for the fastest-growing YouTube channel, getting one million hits in its first week of operation last Christmas, but with more than 1.6 million visits to date it ranks as the nineteenth most popular channel on the site. Hollywood Records is twentieth.

The Queen and Prince Philip were not the only octogenarians there able to navigate their way round a keyboard. One of the YouTube stars whom they met was Peter Oakley, 81, from Derbyshire, better known as geriatric1927. He has posted about 150 video diaries since discovering YouTube two years ago and has attracted millions of hits.

The Duke asked him why he did it. “I nearly said what I say to my friends, that I’m just an attention-seeking bore, but I didn’t. I gave him some sensible answer,” Mr Oakley said.

The royal visit was celebrated with an image of the Queen being incorporated into Google’s UK homepage logo, the so-called Google doodle, an honour that she shares with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol – and Lego. The toy-brick people got one for the company’s 50th birthday.

Times Archive, 1932: The King's broadcast message

The youngest and friendliest of the sciences enabled the King to do what no king has ever done before

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One of the perils of visiting a place like Google is that it can be hard to distinguish the mailroom lad from one of the office multimillionaires. One person presented to Her Majesty was a scruffy figure wearing jeans, dirty desert boots and an untucked shirt who managed to keep his hands in his pockets for almost the entire duration of his conversation with her: he turned out to be Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube, who sold the company to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006.

“We could never imagine, when we were hanging out in garages and coffee shops, trying to create a video site for ourselves and our friends to share the clips we were taking with our digital cameras and cellphones, that I would be in London three years later helping the Queen to upload a video to her site,” he said.

Ban on gambling adverts reversed

Google will allow gambling advertising to appear on its search pages in Britain, reversing its decision last year to ban such adverts out of ethical considerations (Murad Ahmed writes).

The ban was lifted today but remained in place for gambling adverts in the rest of the world.

Critics claimed that Google’s decision showed that the credit crunch had forced the company to alter its ethical stance because of new financial considerations.

“The bottom line really is it’s a lot of money,” said Hannah Kimuyu, of Greenlight, the advertising industry experts. “The gambling advertising industry is probably worth £100 million a year. A lot of advertisers have had to halve their budgets in the past year. They’ve got to recover this money somewhere.”

Google said that the reversal was a “cultural” decision and deemed acceptable in Britain because of “local business practices”.

It insisted that only licensed gambling companies would be allowed to advertise on its pages, and said that such advertisers would be classed as “non-family-safe”, meaning the adverts can be blocked by a parental control mechanism.

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