In an interview with the New York Observer Josh Cohen, Google News' senior business project manager (they need catchier titles over there) says the controversy between his service and publishers is mostly "a media concoction that "makes for a good story."

A good story that then appears on Google News. But anyway. Cohen, 40, who's based in Google's Chelsea offices, says he has daily conversations with publishers and that his relationship with them is good or even great. New features which allow publishers to customize what appears and present it in shiny ways — like this, which launched today — are helping too, he adds. But the main thing is that it's not his fault newspapers are dying:

There are a number of factors of why newspapers are facing these issues today," he said. "I mean, pick any one, whether it's declining circulation rates, migration of classified ads, we could spend a half an hour. There's no one single solution, as in there's no one single cause for it.

Schmidt once dismissed Twitter as a "poor man's email system." But as the microblogging service has picked up more users, more activity and more search traffic, Google has been forced to take it more seriously. Today, Schmidt's engineers announced that Twitter-style "real-time" searching of tweets would be integrated into Google's core search service. I guess that's what you'd call a Poor Man's Real Time Search Engine, mmmm? Whoops.

Even worse, Schmidt's attempt to join Twitter itself proved something of a disaster this morning. He first logged on with the handle "eschmidt0", prompting a cyber-diss from high-profile New York tech executive Anil Dash:

Oh, snap! Surely a big-time CEO wouldn't let a zinger like that get under his skin right?

Except that within a few hours Schmidt had duly changed his handle and moved over his old content:

It looks like Schmidt also received some help from the Poor Man's Email Service's Rich Man's Identity Authenticator, because he's now got a "Verified Account." Throwing his (semi-)celebrity weight around at Twitter Inc.? Schmidt's starting to get the swing of things. Now just tweet about your next lunch choice, Eric. We promise not to mock. Too hard.

Mayers' three-day nuptials at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, were announced via an elborate invitation, a heavy red box covered in a velvety material, as we've reported previously. That sounded about right for the fashion-conscious overachiever.

The Google VP's obsessiveness apparently extends to security, as well: The invitations indicate guests are to keep some sort of ID card on them at all times during the weekend, we're now told.

And said guests aren't sure what this means: Are these "smart" cards implanted with radio "RFID" tags? If so, guests could theoretically be tracked across a 135-foot radius with a stationary receiver. Or maybe they'll be simple credit-card-style tokens with a magnetic stripe, swiped on demand. Or maybe former cheerleader Mayer has something more festive and creative in mind. If you've got a clue, do share it with us.

Requiring that guests basically wear a tracking tag will certainly further the image of Google as Big Brother. The search giant tracks a staggering amount of personal data, and company executives have lately been clumsy in answering mounting media questions about the info-hoard. Then again, some of Mayers' guests will be fellow Google executives; perhaps having a taste of their own medicine will have a moderating effect on the data Google collects.

Speaking of which: Though Mayer is employee number 20 at Google and has great power within the company, it's not at all clear that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be in attendance at her wedding. Mayer was not invited to Page's private-island wedding to Lucy Southworth, a source close to the event tells us, so she could hardly be expected to invite Page to her bash.

In any case, a tracking scheme will certainly help Mayer keep out the likes of Valleywag as her wedding party makes its way around the Four Seasons, even as it reinforces her rep as something of a data-hungry cyborg. No worries Marissa; we'll try not to take it out on your gift.

(Pic: Mayer, by Esther Dyson)

Video via Jenny 8 Lee, and credit where it's due: Ryan Tate offered that the "U.S. should license Hello Kitty for some kind of Guantanamo infomercial." Not bad. Who else could benefit from cute, cuddly characters to calm the nerves of a populace about to have their lives dramatically changed by people who want to control the world?

Oh, you know. The usual suspects:

The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

Didn't they think it was fishy when Google credited 11 inventors on two continents in its newly-issued patent? That's a lot of brainpower for child's play, and even for, as the patent calls it, a broader "WEB-BASED SYSTEM FOR GENERATION OF INTERACTIVE GAMES BASED ON DIGITAL VIDEOS." (Thanks to commenter theodp for pointing the patent out to us.)

Google illustrated the patent with pictures of the age-old kids game "rocks, paper, scissors," and described some very boring uses, like:

Clicking on an annotation corresponding to a 'rock', "paper", or "scissors" menu item leads to separate video or portion of the same video depicting a tie, a win, or a loss, respectively, each outcome potentially leading to the display of additional annotations representing a second round of the game.

Whatever. This will be used immediately for porn. And even though that sort of thing is not allowed on YouTube per se, Google will earn further insane riches on the royalties.

The vandalism appears only to be on the page for this particular Planned Parenthood. How did they do it? The page has been registered with Google's Local Business Center, which means only that business can edit it. So, either a pro-life person registered the page under the guise of Planned Parenthood and uploaded the picture, or it was legitimately registered by Planned Parenthood and hacked into. (The second case seems more likely, as all the other info on the page is correct.) Or maybe the Bleeker St. Planned Parenthood just felt like they were getting too busy.

This isn't the first time Google Maps has been used as the site of political conflict: Last month, the Times covered the controversy sparked when some Indians used Google's crowd-sourced Map Maker program to try to claim disputed Kashmir territory as their own. Users have become increasingly sophisticated in the ways they game an increasingly sophisticated Google to political ends; the challenge for Google is to find a way to regulate this stuff in the future and guarantee good search results without tripping the censorship wire.

We've come a long way from "Miserable Failure".

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

John Koblin puts a number on the Wall Street Journal's recently announced plans to move into New York City metro coverage: $15 million. "You could drive a truck through the space between the wonderfully titillating tabloids and the perceived self-seriousness of The Times," says one PR man in the NYO. It's a big enough budget to help fill that gap. Although Rupert would prefer to just drive that truck directly over the Times.

And that's his smallest ongoing fight! Much bigger, in the grand scheme of things, is Rupert's willingness to be the media mogul who shouts out loud the thing that all the other media moguls grumble under their breath: Google is stealing from us! Why just yesterday, Rupert said:

"There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite — at times without attribution — the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks, or even months on their stories — all under the tattered veil of fair use."

He has (some of) a point! And even more remarkably, Google knows it. The Googleplex announced that they're going to (somewhat) close the technological loophole that allowed you to use Google News to jump over pay walls and read stories for free. Instead of being able to go to Google News, type in a headline from, say, the WSJ, and read as many stories as you want without subscribing, now Google "will allow publishers to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day."

Rupert gets results. The New York Times is probably offering him a free Weekender subscription right now, to try to soften him up. But don't get it twisted: He's just begun to fight. He likes this stuff!

And by "Google Phone" we don't simply mean another Android handset. We're talking about Google-branded hardware running a version of Android we haven't yet seen.

Over the next few weeks, Google Phones (most probably in early, prototype form) will flood the Mountain View campus. They'll don large LCDs while running a new version of Android—either Flan or the version of Android beyond it—which our source spotted running on Google's handset as well as a laptop. (Whatever the software was, it most certainly wasn't Chrome OS, we were assured.)

But maybe the most intriguing bit is what someone said to our source offhandedly, that the current Android, the we all know and love, is not the "real" Android. So what makes for a "real" version of Android?

Our best guess is an Android OS with Google Voice at its heart.

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

According to quotes compiled by blogger Dan Lyons, Dodge used to say things like "Microsoft is a great company to work for" is "always putting employees first." But he's changed his tune, now that he works for Google. A new post on his personal blog starts with this dig at his old employer:

Laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits isnot cool. But hey, thanks for pushing me on to the Next Big Thing.

And suddenly, Dodge has a new viewpoint about Gmail. Before:

Even Microsoft's online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail... Gmail... doesn't compare to Microsoft Outlook.

Now:

Outlook... was getting kind of tired. Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context... One other subtle thing: no spam. I never realized how much corporate spam invaded my Microsoft inbox.

But he "realizes" now!

Thanks for all the "thanks," Don, but the "fuck you" is still implied. Not that we're complaining.

(Pic: Dodge, by Jay Goldman)

Mayer's union with real estate investment manager Zach Bogue will take place as part of a wedding stretching from Dec. 11 - 13 at the San Francisco Four Seasons, we're told. Mayer and Bogue bring out the competitive overachievers in one another, and the event sounds like an extension of their mutual mania. Even the invitation came wrapped in a heavy red velvet box, said a tipster.

The lengthy wedding should only further Mayer's reputation for aggressive well-roundedness: She was on both the debate team and pom-pom squad in high school, and today her master's degree in computer science makes a geeky contrast to the Oscar de la Renta clothes and fashion spreads in Vogue and Glamour. In keeping with the theme, we'd expect her fairytale weddings to have some geeky twists (laser tag, anyone?). If you have any further details — or better yet, a picture — we'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Added location of the Four Seasons.

UPDATE: We failed to mention that Mayer lives at the SF Four Seasons, in a penthouse, as we've reported previously. So maybe she's having the wedding at home.

(Pic by JD Lasica)

Business Insider has the full, 29-picture photo tour. Google has been outfitting its various offices like this for a while, but it's always an eye-openingly retro experience to actually see the office trappings of the hugely profitable company. Below, find our five favorites, the ones that really take us back to the days of Webvan and Pets.com. We mock, of course, because we're insanely jealous.

The reception area is straightforward enough...

Google takes a systematic approach to free snacks. A less successful dot-com would just have pre-wrapped candy and open/stale cereal boxes and so forth.

"We've hired a substitute short-order cook named David Chang. Apologies in advance if he screws up your lunch."

Of course there are razor scooters.

The requisite exposed brick. Plus a can of of kerosene in case you should ever feel disgruntled. Don't be evil!

Puru Pratap's design to spruce up the Google logo for a day (see below) beat out designs from other Indian contestants. It ran on the home page Saturday and Pratap got a laptop for himself and the equivalent of $2,100 for his school. His counterpart in America, meanwhile, will take home a laptop, $15,000 for herself and $25,000 for her school. Granted, a dollar goes further in India than in the U.S. But $2,100 vs $40,000 is a huge divide.

Asked Shalini Singh at the Indian website TechGoss: "Are we children of a lesser Google?" Maybe. Or perhaps Google is trying to deliver India's kids a lesson in the harsh realities of globalization.

(Pic by Anil Jadhav)