Yeah, it’s probably a copyright violation on some level, but here’s a song called “Just Google”, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Beat It: Funny stuff.
This isn’t the first Google song. Check out “Talking About Google” and Saturday Night Live’s “Goo Goo Googling Him”.
(via Amit Agarwal)
Also, take a look at this April Fools announcement from Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone regarding A

Valleywag writes about a billboard on California’s Highway 101, that reads:
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
The reference is about Ask.com, but the question is: Who bought it? Sure, Google is the likely culprit, perhaps as a response to Ask’s “Information Revolution” campaign, but evidence is pointing in the direction of Ask buying it themselves. The evidence: A later billboard apparently reads:
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSE

We are now under two weeks away from Search Engine Strategies New York, the premier search industry event in my backyard, and boy am I excited. Search Engine Roundtable is planning a huge amount of coverage, planning to liveblog about 80% of all sessions. I’ll probably do the same for a few interesting panels, and hopefully I’ll get to run into SER’s Weinberg blogger, Tamar Weinberg. Plus, I get to show off my new long hair!

Two recent international Google Doodle logos courtesy of Zorgloob:
The first is easy, it’s the Persian New Year: Google’s done the Persian New Year thing before, in 2006: And 2005: The second one, according to the translation, is to celebrate the International Day of the Francophonie: What is the International Day of the Francophonie? No, it’s not a day for French people who are disingenuous, but rather a day to celebrate

Michael Moritz, a Sequoia Capital general partner and Google board member since 1999, is leaving Google’s board by not seeking re-election on May 10, 2007. There are many reasons being passed around for why Moritz is leaving, including that he is being blamed for the “YouTube nightmare” (Sequoia was the lead investor in YouTube, and Mike may have been influential in the deal), that he has too much of a conflict of interest bet

Google bike Hosted on Zooomr
Google is running a program in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, giving free Google-branded bikes and bike helmets to over 2,000 permanent employees. Employees will be able to choose between several models, including a “cool cruiser” folding bike and hybrid road/mountain bikes.
I wonder what a Google-branded bike would look like…

I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because

Google Giga Ball Hosted on Zooomr
The new must-have item at the Google campus: The Giga Ball! Well, I don’t know if any Googlers have this already, but they should. I mean, what does Google need more than giant colored balls?
There are several Giga Balls:
The 84-inch red Giga Ball, currently unavailable at Amazon, but $200 at Target: The 51-inch yellow Giga Ball, $49.99 at Amazon: The six-foot (72-inch) yellow Mega Giga Ball, $180-$195

Om Malik spotted this Google kiosk in a mall in western Delhi, India. Google knows there are a lot of people they want to hire in India, and they’ve figured there’s no better way to reach young, smart, potential engineers than at the mall.

I was at the mall this past weekend and spotted a Dell kiosk across from the Time Warner Cable store I was visiting

Word came out last weekend that brothers Chad and Ryan Steelberg, who founded radio advertising company dMarc and then sold it to Google, have left Google just a year after the deal. Google bought dMarc for $102 million, with as much as $1.13 billion extra coming if certain revenue targets were met

Here’s a funny little hack: Someone figured out that a little bit of JavaScript can make the Google logo fly around your web browser. Just visit Google.com and paste this code in your address bar:
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);
Watch it in action:

(via Beep Me > Digg)
Also worth mentioning: There’s a Google Doodle today for Valentine’s Day:

As more than one person has asked me today, where’s the “l” in Google? My guess: It’s the stem.
UPDATE: Looks like I was right

The Ask.com blog has a funny post about the failure of a Google product: Their Google-branded pen. If the post is to be taken seriously (and, oh god, don’t), the loss of ink from the pen is a major failure of Google product design and has contributed to chaos in Ask’s offices. They even did the standard Google troubleshooting tip of asking Matt Cutts, but nothing seems to have worked.
“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview

Google ran this Doodle logo on January 26th, Australia Day, on Google.com.au:

Via Gary, whose also got a logo Yahoo ran that day.

This is some startling news: According to Doug Kass at TheStreet.com, Apple is preparing for a situation where CEO Steve Jobs will have to step down, temporarily, to deal with a stock options backdating scandal. If that does happen, the Apple board member who would likely take the reins of the company until his return: None other than Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The idea of this sort of thing happening is so mind-boggling that I refuse to believe it to be true, but if it did happen, the possibilities are endless

Google has announced a speaker series to be hosted at their New York City offices, bringing some cool talks at the Google offices for everyone to enjoy. The first talk is this Monday, with Adam Bosworth talking about “Physics, Speed, and Imprecision: What Works and What Doesn’t in Software, and Why”

Take a look at this photo by Niall Kennedy, highlighted by Valleywag:

So, not only does Google have a fake space ship, now they’ve got a fake (and very angry-looking) dinosaur. What’s next? My guess: A replica of the Titanic.

Google ran this Doodle yesterday in honor of Martin Luther King Day:

I wonder, why isn’t it Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Not marketable enough?

Gary Price reports that employees from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were all named Fellos of the Association for Computing Machinery. From, Google, Director of Research Peter Norvig and researcher/University of Washington professor Alon Halevy were named fellows. Yahoo’s winner was Dr. Usama Fayyad, their Chief Data Officer, and Microsoft’s was Susan Dumais, Principal Researcher of the Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group at Microsoft Research.

Fortune released their tenth annual list of the “100 Best Companies To Work For”, and for the first time, Google landed at the top of the list.
At Google you can enjoy free gourmet meals; do your laundry; drop off your dry cleaning; get an oil change and get a massage all onsite. Work is such a cozy place that it’s sometimes difficult for Google employees to leave the office, which is precisely how the company justifies the expenses, none of which it breaks out of its administrative costs

The New York Times ran an article today about some new hiring procedures Google is using, most notably an exam that attempts to see how similar you are to other people already working at Google. Google is now looking beyond grade point averages and SAT scores (and the old joke about PhDs) to find more well-rounded candidadtes that might fit in well with the culture already established at Google.
Some details from the article:

Google receives more than 100,000 job applications a month.
Google may double in size over the next year to 20,000 employees, hiring 200 people a week.
Previously, engineers needed a 3.7 GPA, while ad sales required a 3.0.
It used to take up to two months to hire a candidate.
Last summer, Google asked every employee who had worked there at least five months to fill out a 300-question survey.
Sample questions: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to? Is your work space messy or neat? Are you an extrovert or an introvert? What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have?
The data from the surveys was compared against performance data, in order to determine if certain types of people tended to perform better.
The first thing Google found: Academic performance did not correlate with job performance.

“Sometimes too much schooling will be a detriment to you in your job,” Dr

Valleywag is reporting there are serious rumors that one of Google’s two young founders has gotten engaged. If their tipsters are to be beli–
Wait a minute! Didn’t we do this same damn story eight months ago?!? Damn!
Did A Google Guy Get Engaged?
By Nathan Weinberg
Valleywag is reporting there are serious rumors that one of Google’s two young founders has gotten engaged

Happy New Year everybody! Lets hope this year is even better than the last (which, unless you got married like I did, isn’t too hard).
Here’s Google’s New Years Doodle:

UPDATE: Gary is catching a whole bunch of logos, mostly various international search logos. I’m shocked that at 1:43 am Eastern, Yahoo and Ask still haven’t put up theirs.
For reference, here are all the previous New Year’s Doodles:
2006:

2005:

2004:

2003:

2002:

2001:

2000:

Google has had a rash of missteps in the last few day, leaving a negative feeling going into the new year.
First off: Google accidently deleted the inboxes of some 60 Gmail users, leaving them with none of their stored email (and, surprisingly, Google’s vaunted server architecture didn’t have any backups either)

Here’s a rundown of other search engine’s logos for the holidays:
Yahoo ran a nice Flash logo with falling snow and a skating penguin and gingerbread man. Reload the page to see the animation from the beginning.

Here’s the non-Flash image version:

Check out Resource Shelf for some of Yahoo’s logos from other countries.
Ask ran one of their full screen images, this year of snow and a Christmas tree:

Gary Price has Ask UK’s different front page image, a simpler holiday bow

Ladies and gents, the final Doodle in Google’s Doodle 12 holiday logo lineup. See the whole lineup at this page.
Oh, and Merry Christmas to all (except those who don’t celebrate Christmas, they get a Merry Monday), and to all a good night (except those in other timezones, for whom there may be daylight already)! Have a non-denominational politically-correct good time!

Google has done three more Doodles over the last few days, continuing its Google Doodle 12 series of holiday logos. Here is the entire series so far, with the last one the logo you’ll currently see running on Google.com:

You’ll be able to see the entire series at this page. Looks like tomorrow might be the last one.
This year’s Doodle logo is pretty good, much more traditional than last year’s or the year before’s, and makes a hell of a whole lot more sense

For the second year in a row, Google has added a vertical row of tiny imags next to its AdWords ads on Google search, in order to commemorate the holidays. Run a search on Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, and you’ll get a little treat on the right (Christmas trees for Christmas, white candles for Hanukkah, and green, black and red candles for Kwanzaa)

Google held last Friday its first Pajama Day, when workers were encouraged to wear their PJs to work. According to Robert Cringely, the event was described as a beta test for the future, and those from “cultures where pajamas are not worn” had a special exemption. Googler Kimbalina posted a photo of her PJ pants and slippers, which blended in well with the carpet.
One Googler’s wife posted a picture of herself standing with her husband, both in their PJs, him having just returned home from work

Aaron Swartz has an interesting post, one no doubt many people would disagree with, about how Google “infantilizes” their employees. The theory goes that everything in the Googleplex’s culture, including the free food, big colored balls, laundry, fake spaceships and giant dinosaurs, are all designed to prevent Googlers from growing up and getting independent, especially since they are mostly recruited out of college

Google has announced a program designed to make cashing in those stock options a hell of a lot easier for their employees. The program is designed to make it easier for employees to cash in their options, by allowing them to transfer (i.e.: to sell them) their options to other financial institutions

Google France is running this Doodle today in honor of the birthday of Edward Munch:

(via Zorgloob)

Googler Kimbalina writes about the big holiday bash Google held Friday night at San Francisco’s Pier 48. Here’s her Flickr photoset from this and previous Google holidays:

The party had a Greek theme, with seperate rooms arranged according to different themes. Kimbalina says the party really showed off just how big Google has grown over the last year, and that despite their laid-back styles at work, “Googlers clean up very nicely”.
Niniane Wang uploaded a whole slideshow of photos to her Smugmug account, located here (the password is intentionally simple to crack, I assume)

Google has announced that Google Answers, the very first non-search project from Google, is closing down forever. Come the end of the year, Answers will stop accepting new questions, although the old pages will remain up as archives.
Why is Google shutting down Answers? Given their huge number of servers and the low usage of Answers, Google could have kept it up practically for free, so the only reason I can think of: Google is sending a message

Happy Turkey Day, dear readers! Hopefully, everyone (who isn’t boycotting the holiday) will enjoy a feast tonight with the people they love the most.
Here are today’s search engine logos celebrating this day of thanks… giving:
Google:

Yahoo:

Ask doesn’t go all out, as in the past, but does put a, uh, thing, on their front page:

Philipp has an image showing the different Google Thanksgiving logos over the years

There’s a useful li’l weight tracker you can add to your Google personalized homepage, created by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, a Google software engineer. Brian calls the Gadget the Google 15, after the weight geeks usually gain after starting their Google jobs and being introduced to all the free food.
Brian has written out a FAQ, which explains how the tracker uses a moving average, making it a more accurate and realistic look at how your weight is changing over the last two weeks, as well as giving some good tips on losing weight realistically

Yahoo and Google met up Sunday to settle their differences once and for all, in a war… of tennis. The Battle Over The Net was fierce, with 20-30 players duking it out in eight lightning fast games of doubles, but in the end, only one search company stood triumphant: Yahoo. Yahoo won by a short margin of 163 to 157, and you can bet those Googlers are itching for a rematch.
There’s a great photo gallery at Picasa Web Albums, including the cake and a big huggy group shot.
(via Philipp)

The US government has issued its report derived from all the user search histories it subpoena’d earlier this year. Seth Finkelstein says the findings include: “About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website