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Google used to say its lavish perks bolstered productivity and, if anything, would only grow more posh. But a recession changes things. Now the official line is more like, just be happy you're working, you ungrateful fucking pigs.

Good news, jobless poors: The recession is over, according to the billionaire nerds who run Google. Their computers told them so, and now the executives are in New York to spread the word and count their gold bars.

Media mogul and grumpy old man Rupert Murdoch has developed a "personal antipathy to the Internet," biographer Michael Wolff writes. Murdoch even thinks MySpace, which he himself paid $580 million for, is kind of a criminal piece of garbage:

Say what you will about Google's propensity for funneling money to a tight, back-scratching coterie of friends; but co-founder Sergey Brin does right by his mother-in-law, which is more than many husbands can say. Witness his new half-million-dollar donation.

Google hasn't been shy about sharing its riches with select friends outside the company. And the number one rule of this tightly-knit group seems to be: spread the love. Which brings us to 23AndMe's new, very incestuous blimp.

Google's complicated relationship with its founder's wife just got more tangled. Anne Wojcicki's genetic-testing startup, 23andMe, not only took a second round of funding from the company — it's now cohabitating with the search giant.

The open secret about Google's forthcoming product "Wave" is that no one knows what the hell it does. Here's the tech gibberish the Guardian used to describe the software after talking to Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

Former Intel chief Andy Grove famously believed that "only the paranoid survive" in Silicon Valley business. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem intent to inject this spirit back into fat, dominant Google. They're even worrying about Bing.

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor who mentored Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, was found dead in the pool of his Atherton, California home. He was 47.

Speaking at Google's developer's conference in San Francisco today, Sergey Brin launched some fresh nomenclature into the jargony culture of computer programmers: "Page's Law." He was trying to make a point about the speed of Google's Web apps; instead he's done co-founder Larry Page a huge favor.

Dear Ryan:

As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.

Larry Page, the dorkier half of Google's founding duo, has mastered at least one basic human function: His wife, former model and Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. Lucy Southworth, is pregnant.

23andMe, the Google-backed genetic-testing startup run by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, has everyone from Rupert Murdoch on down spitting into test tubes at parties. Too bad it's useless!

Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. Yeah, right! Take a look at who's behind Google's new $100 million venture-capital fund, and you'll see how things really work in the cradle of technology.

Remember last year's Fashion Week party for Anne Wojcicki (Mrs. Sergey Brin) and Linda Avey's gene-testing site 23andme.com, where the likes of Ivanka Trump touted their newly-discovered genetic blessedness while other attendees spit into test tubes to enjoy the scientific equivalent of a palm reading? While…

Google cofounder Sergey Brin and wife Anne Wojcicki are so unconcerned with privacy that they're donating their newborn son's DNA to science. So surely they won't mind if we tell you the kid's name.

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

Google's perfectionist cupcake princess is totally misunderstood! That's the claim Marissa Mayer, the VP who oversees Google search, makes to a credulous New York Times, which licks up the frosted version of her career.