What will Google be like without Marissa Mayer, the glamour nerd whose goofy laugh so neatly captures the search engine's adolescent awkwardness? We'll know soon. We hear the company's 19th employee is planning her goodbye.

It's Google's presidency. We're just watching it. Six Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page, have donated $25,000 apiece to fund President Barack Obama's swearing-in party.

Groans are issuing from the Googleplex over this year's holiday bonus. In the past, the search engine paid cash — as much as $20,000 or $30,000 per Googler, we hear. This year? A cell phone.

"Scarcity brings clarity," says Marissa Mayer, the blonde cyborg who runs Google's search engine, in a BusinessWeek interview. She makes fun of Dilbert-style managers — but in reality, she shows how she's turned into one.

No, really. Schneller says he was able to buy cut-rate advertising time for FoxwoodFiends.com through Google's experimental TV-advertising auction. He spent $500 to reach 330,000 Dish Network subscribers tuned in to the Oxygen, ESPN2, or WPT channels.

It's official: We no longer trust Google with our privacy. [SFGate]

It's a classic geek insult: A Google executive has called the Wall Street Journal "confused" about its stance on whether companies should be able to buy themselves a fast lane on the Internet.

Need more examples? Here are commercials from MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. (I found them using Google and YouTube, a Google-owned video-hosting site.) Do any of them articulate a reason to switch search engines?

Google is throwing not one, not two, but three holiday parties for its New York employees this year. Such is the cash-flush search engine's definition of austerity.

The star of the Times piece is Michael Buckley, a fast-talking and overbearingly gay celebrity commentator — think Ted Casablanca, if Ted Casablanca lived in Connecticut. Buckley says he makes $100,000 a year on YouTube ads. Google sells the ads and splits the revenue with Buckley, as it does with other video creators it has dubbed "partners."

There weren't too many signs of doom and gloom at Google's holiday party last night. The shindig at Penthouse 15 on West 37th Street featured "top shelf liquor (but no shots), filet mignon, and had the sickest game room set up," reports ChiChi212, who somehow managed to sneak her way into what was supposed to be a staff-only event. "There was a moving screening room, a game room with every console imaginable, karaoke. I mean these people were not kidding." Guess not! Unfortunately, she also says the room was filled with "tons of socially awkward people," which is probably because Google decided to schedule separate holiday parties for its engineering and sales staffs. (This was the one for the engineers, obvs.) And it was still a step down from last year's fête, which took place at the Rainbow Room and cost $300 a head. Still, most companies aren't exactly breaking out filet mignon for their employees this year—if they're having a party at all, of course—although you can always refer to this handy roundup that The Business Sheet put together if you feel like reliving the lavish holiday parties of years past.

Looking for some proof that the American cultural economy is as busted as the financial one? Google just released its annual "Zeitgeist" report, which aggregates the billions of searches conducted on the site over the course of the year. Here are the top ten most popular searches for concert tickets: 1. Jonas Brothers; 2. Coldplay; 3. Hannah Montana; 4. Kenny Chesney; 5. Carrie Underwood; 6. Radiohead; 7. Lil Wayne; 8. Madonna; 9. Eagles; 10. Rascal Flatts. [Google Zeitgeist]

Google somehow contrived to include full digital images of old New York magazines in its new magazine search service on Google Books. Sadly, the archive is missing key issues, containing such classics as "Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny's" and "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." But both of those are available, albeit ripped from their original context, on nymag.com, and Google has one classic that isn't: Barbara Goldsmith's "La Dolce Viva," which revealed the seedy side of Andy Warhol's entourage through Viva, a shriveled one-name actress. "I had never seen anything like it," Tom Wolfe wrote of accompanying nude photos from Diane Arbus. But the article's appearance in the fourth debut standalone New York nearly ended Clay Felker's magazine.

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama called his 2004 visit to the Googleplex the "most memorable part" of a trip to California. Google's salespeople are planning to make sure he doesn't forget it.

Hasn't YouTube always seemed too good to be true — all those video clips, for free? We must be getting away with something. That's why rumors about a new YouTube virus have spread so far, so fast.

The best place to work in America is becoming like every other big corporation. Google, at its heart an overgrown advertising agency, is most famous for its lavish perks. Now those are disappearing.

Want to know what worry-prone consumers are looking for online? Marissa Mayer, the search engine's prettiest vice president, went on Today to reveal its top searches for 2008.

If a YouTube video gets yanked, if a Blogger blog gets deleted, if a website disappears from Google's search results, chances are Google lawyer Nicole Wong had something to do with it. Wong has kept a low profile, aside from the occasional post on Google's official blog, but after a profile in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, it's likely she'll be hearing more pleas than ever from frustrated users whose works have vanished from Google's sprawling Web empire.

Two weeks after Valleywag stopped believing that President-for-Change Obama might steal Eric Schmidt from Google, Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget has weighed in with the same speculation. His bullet list of reasons Schmidt might quit isn't crazy, but here's the six-word version of Blodget's post: "We have no inside knowledge here. " I have enough inside knowledge to say this: true Googlers don't see Google as a stepping-stone to a government job. Government is part of the problem. Google is the solution. (Photo by Reuters/Carlos Barria)

"Up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources," writes Daya Baran. Can I just say it? No. Google will not dump 10,000 of its roughly 30,000 workforce. "Sources" are wrong, although Baran's tales of Google shuffling its so-called temporary employees around to game SEC rules are true. Google's most likely action will be a stealthy attrition of maybe around 2,000 underperformers. That'll be bad enough.