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)

Blogger Ben Casnocha's friend told him, "There is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google." That seems to be true, judging from the blunt queries offered up by Google's autocomplete suggestions, which are generated based on other similar and popular searches. In other words, people have asked these actual questions, niftily compiled by Slate:

The suggestions get classier if you rephrase your query to sound more edum'cated. But still disturbing:

Disturbing though they may be, these suggestions are at least anonymous. Anonymous, that is, until Google "suggests" a search to a federal agent that makes him wonder, "Who the hell asked that?" Until that inevitable day, have fun.

News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller (pictured) said at a Monaco media event that his conglomerate plans to block Google (at least partially) within "months and quarters — not weeks... The traffic which comes in from Google... is the least valuable of traffic to us." That's according to the Telegraph, and followed similar comments from Miller's boss Rupert Murdoch just days before.

So why all the noise? Blocking Google is a straightforward process involving simple text files, not a big act of war that requires lengthy preparation.

Maybe Microsoft has offered News Corp. a middle ground between charging for content and leaving search engines entirely. Bing might offer a cut of ad revenue to News Corp. and other content providers in return for exclusively appearing in the Microsoft search engine, former weblog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis recently suggested.

And that idea isn't far fetched. The Associated Press's CEO recently said Microsoft was offering AP many more favors than Google:

Curley said he was negotiating a new partnership with Microsoft under conditions more favorable to the AP and its members...



Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP's demands. "They have said very strongly that they would," Curley responded... "They know how to have a conversation." And what about Google? "I'm not talking about Google," he said. "We haven't talked."

So maybe in the end Rupert Murdoch, the doddering newspaper fetishist, will have the last laugh over Google, reclaiming "his" content revenue... and delivering it straight to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Oh, Rupert.

(Pic by Dave McClure)

UPDATE: This new TechCrunch story about Microsoft's meeting with European publishers confirms that Microsoft's strategy is to ally with the likes of News Corp. against Google: "Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google's flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News."

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

"Go!" creator Frank McCabe is up in arms over Google's "Go"; he's demanded the company change the name of its language so he doesn't have to chage the name of his own programming language, which "I have been working on... for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book."

Not only that, but a journal article on McCabe's creation is still in the top 20 hits for a Google search on "Go programming language" even days after the new language has polluted the results. And that book? You can look at the cover and "preview" much of the content over on Google Books, which appears to have scanned the whole thing in.

Google got two geek gods, Unix co-creator Ken Thompson and operating system pioneer Rob Pike, to design its new language. Maybe it should have enlisted some mere Google-using mortals to polish the language's branding.

[via Slashdot]

A tipster forwarded us the above video, produced by and starring people who are supposed to be superhuman smarties: Google employees. And yet here they are pulling a Julia Allison. Maybe it's a simple case of geographic envy. Though they're singing about Los Angeles and filming the palm trees outside their office windows, these Googlers are in San Francisco, where the weather is getting damper, foggier and colder as the fall wears on. And the BART's been all full of morotists displaced by the broken Bay Bridge.

Or maybe this bunch just wanted a chance to show off their hip-twirling (especially the guy with the square design on his shirt, who clearly has been practicing in his moves in his bedroom mirror for like days). In any case, we couldn't help but notice a few things about their playground-y office environment:

UPDATE: The Googlers got shy and yanked the video; we've captured it and appended it to the end of the gallery, so you can enjoy the full experience of how workers play behind the Google curtain.

Notice the office fan. Who at the hugely profitable online company has been depriving these poor souls of proper air conditioning? At least they'll have those nifty Google zippered hoodies when the climate control fails them again this winter.

The free drinks fridge is fully stocked; apparently CEO Eric Schmidt was telling the truth about the company's return to growth mode after all!

We can't decide if that huge picture in the background is a cast promo for a late 1990s sitcom, or a picture of everyone in this office impersonating a Friends poster. (It's like we're always stuck in second hear...)

A massage chair, fun! We're not going to ask what the masseuse does behind that privacy screen back there. (Shameful, shameful lipdubs, probably.)

Work it! And when you're done could you mix us a very dry martini from the "lava lamps" sitting on the bar back there? Thanks!

"We're going to keep dancing until we've raised enough money to fix our office's crippling flat-panel-TV shortage! Our storage closets and several feet of our hallway are completely without gigantic flat panel monitors over every square inch and it's very sad. Operators are standing by for your donations."

"And I will keep rapping until there is a third flat panel monitor on this structural support beam, yo."

More evidence of the Googlers' sincere love for singer Miley Cryus and their selfless willingness to be the next internet company to host her ramblings now that she's gone and left Twitter.

It would seem Google lacks those fancy and super-comfortable Aeron chairs that became an icon for the c. 2000 dot-com boom. And it's already undermining the quality of its lipdubs; this account manager couldn't slide smoothly onto the screen, thanks to Google's cheap Office Depot chair.

When you learn to lip-sync more accurately you can be sent to the real LA. Until then, here's the Embarcadero's remarkable simulation!

We're not sure why Googlers got shy and yanked this video off of YouTube; one would think they'd be proud that the company retains a playful spirit despite the three rounds of layoffs early this year. And we've seen far worse lip-syncing! (Well, slightly worse, at least.)

Google said in a blog post that it has been inundated with requests to add a "history" function to its Google Latitude, a mobile phone app that shows where your (authorized) friends on the service are located at any given moment. This would be the exact "feature" that Google intentionally disabled at launch to allay concerns about privacy, to much praise from civil libertarians. Google will add logs to your Latitude service now if you flip a switch, and it can also send you "Location Alerts" if you're especially enthusiastic about Orwellian internet services.

Why do we need this? Google's Chris Lambert explained:

I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who once said, "They who would trade liberty for BBQ soon have none, deserve neither, and end up eating Prison Loaf thanks to small-town CSI wannabes with subpeona power."

[via Gizmodo]

(Top pic by gerlos on Flickr)

Mayer was employee number 20 and retains immense power within the Googleplex. But, as much as she likes to insinuate her vital early contributions to hits like GMail and AdSense, the VP for "search product and user experience" isn't quite the very bedrock of Google's success, as Glamour seems to imply in naming Mayer one of its "Women of the Year:"

We google about 7 billion times a month. And each time, it's like a trip into Marissa Mayer's mind. That sunny logo, blessedly spare interface and perfect list of links you get in response to a query are all pure Mayer.

Google's minimalist design and "perfect" search utility are "pure Mayer?" Google co-founder and Mayer ex Larry Page would take issue with that; he invented the algorithm at the heart of Google while a Stanford University PhD student. Co-founder Sergey Brin, part of the same PhD program, also contributed to the system. Google also had what was, by the standards of the day, a spartan homepage going well before Mayer joined in 1999, complete with a "sunny" if slightly fatter logo.

So while Mayer should continue to enjoy tonight's Glamour awards ceremony, relish her pretty pictures in the magazine (above) and stand proud of her accomplishments at Google, there's no need to give the competitive overachiever credit for every last innovation at the company.

(Top pic: Glamour)

Mayer discussing her award on Today this morning:

The AdMob deal announced today is the third largest acquisition in Google's history, behind only DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.7 billion). But no one's really been talking about the mobile advertising network or its early-thirtysomething founder Omar Hamoui until now. Hamoui is downright anonymous.

Here's what we've learned about him based on his low internet profile and scant press clippings:

• Has all of 441 followers on Twitter. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, who sold his weblogging company for less than 1/20th as much, has 77,000 followers.
  
• 32 years old as of May.
  
• Earned a bachelor's in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles and dropped out of the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
  
• Ran computer programming company Vertical Blue for almost four years.
  
• Senior program manager at Sony Pictures Digital, about two years.
  
• COO of startup called GoPix.
  
• Started HerBabyShower.com.
  
• Started FotoChatter, for sharing pictures between cell phones, but left the venture behind after becoming frustrated with the inefficiency of advertising his site to mobile users.
  
• Came up with AdMob as a solution to the FotoChatter advertising headaches while at Wharton, at age 28.
  
• In 2007, Bill Gates personally asked Omar Hamoui to speak at Microsoft's annual gathering of journalists, according to a July 207 Ad Age article. Gates had just bought one of Hamoui's competitors.
  
• Last year, toured Kara Swisher of All Things D through his cramped headquarters in San Mateo, a town on the San Francisco Peninsula not exactly famous as a startup hotbed. (See below).
  
• Google bought AdMob after attempting to launch a mobile ad network of its own (AdSense Mobile).

(Pic: Hamoui by Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ )

That's basically what he told his employee in a Sky News Interview, excerpted above:

Q: You could choose not to be on their search engine... so when someone runs a search your websites won't come up.


A: Well, I think we will... when we start charging.

This is certainly technically possible; all it takes is one correctly-placed text file to tell Google to ignore some or all of a website. And who knows, Murdoch's armies of lawyers and lobbyists might even succeed in effecting the other drastic change he mentioned: rolling back the entire doctrine of fair use, an interpretation of copyright law that allows the sort of quoting and selective reproduction of content that Murdoch's newspapers and TV networks engage in every day.

This isn't the first time Murdoch, 78, and his lieutenants have been made unfriendly noises about Google; they've recently attacked the search engine as a "parasite" with "promiscuous" users. This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you're an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here's a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn't instant message those pages to your assistant's Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn't subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.

Google co-founder Page and model-PhD wife Lucy Southworth's new startup would appear to be going public right on schedule. It was seven months ago that word of Southworth's pregnancy leaked in a Silicon Valley newspaper. Now the infant has apparently arrived, following in the golden-bootied footsteps of Benji Brin, billionaire baby boy of Page's co-founder Sergey Brin and wife Anne Wojcicki. Page's child has already done well for himself, entering the world more wealthy than when he was conceived: Page's wealth shot up by $3 billion to $15 billion from March to September on rising Google shares, according to Forbes (here, here). Shares have only gone up more since then.

There's no word yet on whether the new child was preceded by a weird baby shower of the sort Page threw for Brin, involving adults in diapers. In fact, we don't even have a name or sex at this point. Send us more information if you've heard anything. Google.com hasn't been any help on this one. Go figure.

UPDATE: It's a boy! So we're told.

(Pic: Page and Southworth at their December 2007 wedding on Richard Branson's island.)

You might know Google owns YouTube, GMail, GChat, Google News, Google Docs and Google Reader, but the full privacy impact probably hasn't hit you until you look at the information from all those services condensed into one place, on this dashboard thing. Oh look, it's the last person you chatted with, the last person you emailed, the last video you watched, the last news search you ran, the last Google search, the last image search, the last video search, the last document you authored and maybe what you're buying your wife for Christmas.

Here are some of my recent searches, for example, and keep in mind this is just one small part of the dashboard, which in turn is one small part of what Google knows:

Insane. And yet, nothing I didn't know about, on some logical unemotional level. There's a Google video explaining everything above, and you can find your dossier here, but be warned: looking at it could change your life.

Here's the rest of mine, not including my main Google Apps email and Docs accounts, and heavily redacted (sorry) (click to enlarge):

The incident on Silicon Valley's 910 AM neatly encapsulated the computer scientist-music industry culture clash Google Music will have to overcome. Mayer went on the show to tout Google's ability to find songs and lyrics — it reportedly plans to sell MP3s against those searches — but ended up hearing about how one of the hosts was Googling for nude pictures of her. After the segment wrapped, a spy tells us, Mayer "got pissy" with the station over how she'd been treated on air. The hosts later discussed on-air some complaints they'd received from unidentified parties at Google. (See clip above; the full show can be found here at episode 110409 H1.)

It's easy to understand how Mayer became offended. She's got a master's degree in computer science from Stanford, oversees hundreds of managers and thousands of engineers at the world's most powerful internet company — and she was subjected to repeated discussions about whether there are naked pictures of her online. Also easy to understand is how this happened: It's radio. Morning drivetime radio, at that. Crude talk is par for the course. The likes of Howard Stern would consider this segment a giant softball, even if it was followed by a rant about how free school lunches might turn children into lifetime welfare cases (lovely).

In short, welcome to the radio/music business. Get used to the sleaze!