President Barack Obama had a virtual intimate talk with a number of Americans this afternoon in a “Google hangout,” where he received questions from an audience over the computer. One guest in the hangout asked about worker visas in engineering, and gave the President the anecdote of her husband’s three years of temporary employment despite being an engineer. “Send me your husband’s resume,” replied the President.

Rupert Murdoch has been making headlines all over the place simply for his tweets, and now Murdoch has used the social networking platform to weigh in on one of the more controversial pieces of legislation currently under consideration by Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act. As the head of a large company whose subsidiaries act as content providers, Murdoch is naturally in favor of the legislation, but yesterday he was none too happy about the Obama administration coming out saying they would not support any anti-piracy bill that curbs freedom of speech.

Congress is set to return later this month, and one of the most hotly contested pieces of legislation it will be facing is the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill was authored by Republican Lamar Smith, and has received bipartisan support and opposition in the House. There has been a lot of talk about internet- and technology-based companies that support the bill, including GoDaddy (up until recently) and the video game industry.

Joe Lieberman has always been a great pioneer for internet freedom. Last year, he suggested that the United States should implement an internet kill switch in the event of a cyberattack by taking its cues from China. Now Lieberman is calling for the world’s most popular search engine to censor material that could potentially be used to spread terrorist information.

One of the most sought after secrets of the 21st century is the inner-workings of Google’s search algorithm. The company keeps it incredibly private so that no one can discover how to game it and online searching will remain fair for all. However, sometimes the algorithms mysterious process leads to some interesting quirks, especially when [...]

Google’s “Politics and Elections Blog” released data on Thursday revealing some interesting statistics about the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Searches for Occupy Wall Street, according to Google’s Jake Parrillo, currently outpace Tea Party queries, but that’s expected, as it’s a buzzy topic. What Google uncovered, though, was that when both were gathering steam, OWS still outpaced Tea Party in search traffic during their respective early phases. And the blog pinpoints the exact moment when OWS took over the “most-searched” title from the Tea Party: September 24. Since then, OWS searches have far outpaced those for the Tea Party.

Why won’t government regulators leave corporations alone, Stephen Colbert wondered during last night’s episode of The Colbert Report. Why shouldn’t Product-American’s be afforded the same rights as the rest of us? ”The First Amendment protects not only speech you like, but speech you don’t like,” he reminds. “Therefore government regulators must not persecute products just because they don’t fit some beurocrats narrow definition of ‘fireproof’ or ‘potable.’”

It appears the hunger for presidential debates in America is only growing as the networks put on more of such events. Despite being the third debate in the same number of weeks, the Fox News/Google-organized debate last Thursday night clocked in as the most-watched debate on television of the 2012 cycle, and netted Fox News its high-rated primetime this year.

Aside from stealing Rush Limbaugh‘s joke, and stealing the show, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson also stole Google users’ hearts during Thursday night’s Fox News/Google Republican Presidential Debate. Until now an under-the-radar joke, the libertarian-leaning GOP hopeful made the most of his infrequent airtime during the debate, and his crowd-pleasing answers (plus his borrowed line of the night) seem to have connected with debate viewers, according to search data released by Google.

Tonight’s Google/Fox News Republican 2012 presidential debate is the third such event in the past three weeks, and perhaps the testiest of the bunch. Perhaps most indicative of the comfort with which the Republican candidates are slamming each other at this point is this exchange, initially between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, and later picked up by Rick Santorum, on illegal immigration, where Perry took a strong stance in favor of educating undocumented children.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has, for a while now, had to contend with a rather unique PR problem: Dealing with columnist Dan Savage‘s overwhelmingly successful campaign to introduce a new, rather descriptive and very sexual meaning for his last name. The definition, which deals with a particularly messy side effect of partaking in anal [...]

Politico reports that Rick Santorum has contacted Google over the sexually explicit search results that come up when you enter his name through the website. “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

Next week’s GOP debate might be getting a lot of attention right now because of Barack Obama‘s initial plans to air his jobs speech on the same night, but a later debate — scheduled for September 22nd — will be sure to get a lot of attention of its own thanks to a neat little [...]

The world of media reporting is, often enough, something of a clusterf… fiasco, with media people reporting on the personal views or slip-ups or extracurricular activities of their colleagues. Those who report or present the news become newsworthy themselves, and, as such, hold a certain level of celebrity: not enough so that E! is guaranteed to cover their weddings (we can’t all be Kardashians, after all), but enough that they are ripe for satire and parody. To wit: Yesterday, Tim Carney, the Washington Examiner‘s senior political columnist, noticed that a Google+ account ostensibly belonging to economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, posted a rather controversial reaction to the earthquake that resulted in literally dozens of pencils rolling onto the floor.

“People on twitter might be joking,” Kurgman appeared to have written, “but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”

The Associated Press reports that facial recognition technology being considered for the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games in London is being tested by police in the aftermath of Britain’s riots. The AP’s Paisley Dodds and Raphael Satter write officers are “feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard’s newly updated face-matching program” in an attempt to identify those who were responsible for the wave of riots that began in North London and quickly spread. “A law enforcement official tells The Associated Press that facial recognition is one of many tools police are using to hunt suspects still at large.”

Eli Pariser, one of the co-founders of MoveOn, would like you to know that Google is hiding things from you. Not intentionally. It’s just that the algorithms Google uses to sort through search results (and the suggestions it hopefully displays as you type in the search box) are inherent limits. They’re the end result of a particular path – a path informed by what the algorithm knows about you and people like you, mind you, but still, an unseen path. You don’t get the benefit of the journey.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith seemed to cut short an interview with a computer security expert Thursday afternoon, after stopping the guest to ask
if he did business with Google, which was the company the expert was discussing–and lavishly praising. In the segment, about a group of hackers who infiltrated hundreds of Gmail accounts, Symantec executive Francis Desouza began by saying “first, I think Google deserves a lot of credit for coming forward and talking about this attack.”

In a funny clip from last night’s Sports Show with Norm MacDonald, the comedian accused Google of sexism! The reason? Whenever you search something relating to the WNBA, the search engine helpfully (or chauvinistically) asks if you really meant to type “NBA” instead. Sure, Google, maybe if I had typed “WNBA+dunking,” there would have been a mistake, but anything else and you’re just projecting!

Every April Fools’ Day, Google delights (or moderately annoys, we guess, depending on your sense of humor) users with little pranks – more like Easter eggs, really – neatly hidden around the web. And this year is no different!

We’ve noticed a few so far that we’ve really enjoyed.

In its continued bid to take over the world, Google has launched its own quarterly magazine, appropriately named Think Quarterly, in the UK.

As Glenn Beck‘s latest campaign against Google goes to show, he has little trust in large entities, whether they be government-run or private. After dedicating some time this week to asserting that Google’s involvement in the Egyptian revolts gives them a dangerous bias that seeps into the order of search results on their site, Beck took his campaign, as he always does, to an intrigued Bill O’Reilly last night.

Just like Mike Malloy earlier, there was a point on Glenn Beck’s show today where Beck announced that he couldn’t wait to see what the bloggers would have to say about what he said next. Industry tip: It’s moments like this where bloggers should make sure to pay attention. Sure enough, we then got into [...]

This past week, as Glenn Beck railed against Google employees Wael Ghonim and Jared Cohen, many wondered if he was setting up to declare a boycott against the company. Tonight, he clarified his statements. He doesn’t want to call a boycott. He just doesn’t trust them, has decided he won’t use their products unless he has to, and thinks his viewers should look into them (not using Google, of course).

Last week, I accused Glenn Beck of pandering to older viewers in his attacks on social media and Google. It now appears that there was more going on and that Google has found their way amongst the show’s Rogues Gallery, nestled amongst the Weather Underground and the Muslim Brotherhood. On today’s show, Beck advised his audience, as he always does, to do their own homework. However, tonight he told them they probably shouldn’t use Google.

Glenn Beck is certainly not thrilled with the successful revolution in Egypt. While on MSNBC, Chris Matthews and the field reporters in Egypt were giddily wondering whether other Middle Eastern regimes might fall, doom and gloom Beck was praying that it wouldn’t happen. All of this fear also turned the episode into another one of Beck’s classic “Young People Just Don’t Get It” shows as he tackled Google exec and Egyptian protest organizer Wael Ghonim as well as the terrors of social media.