Marissa Mayer resorts to hand gestures to explain complex concepts in terms inferior non-Googlers can understand at last January's DLD conference in Munich, Germany. The four photos in the series also provide an uncanny visual metaphor for Google's initially hot but eventually cooled interest in purchasing Digg. Can you come up with a better caption? Do so in the comments. The best one will become this post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Check out what they were giving away at the PerkettPR booth!" by auntanna. (Photo by Getty/Oliver Lang)

A tipster tells us Google has backed out of talks to buy Digg, the popular news-discussion site fronted by Kevin Rose, the Web-video personality and San Francisco Casanova. There have been hints all week that Google has been cooling on Digg. Marissa Mayer, Google's reigning princess of pageviews, had once fancied Digg as a means of improving Google News, one of her Web properties. Last month, at her behest, acquisition talks were getting serious. But then Mayer brashly (and perhaps foolishly) announced Wednesday that Google News generated $100 million a year in revenues for Google. Translation: Who needs Digg?Shortly thereafter, reearsh firm Hitwise ran numbers which showed that Digg would be inconsequential for Google's traffic, only the 13th largest Web property, well behind Google News. Coincidence? Perhaps, but they can't have been helpful for Digg's negotiations. One other sign that the deal has been going nowhere: Digg has been interviewing for a head of PR. That's a position they wouldn't fill if they were close to a sale. That said, we hear Digg board member Brett Bullington, who helped sell JotSpot to Google in 2006, has been pushing to keep negotiations alive. So are things on? Are they off? Never say never in deals. But even Digg CEO Jay Adelson acknowledged this week, at a meetup with Digg users in Chicago, that his company has been too prone to leaks during negotiations. Could he be getting a taste of the same from the Google side? That's a theory I dig.

The back-channel chatter on Google's Wikipedia-like Knol database, which opened to public editing today, is simple: Google plans to use Knol to replace Wikipedia, then serve ads on it.Jimmy Wales's open encyclopedia sits conspicuously high in Google's results for just about any search. See above: There are only two links in Google to the iffy Wikipedia page about me. Both come from other Wikipedia entries. Yet Google ranks that page higher than any of the articles from my 12-year online writing career. Whether Google artificially boosts Wikipedia's rank or not is a popular drinking topic among search engine optimizers. But Google's certainly not trying to push Wikipedia down any, as they've done with sites deemed problematic in the past. Wikipedia provides a handy reference-book-like entry among the first three results for most searches on famous people or popular topics. Great for us. But imagine if every customer clickthrough to Wikipedia could be rerouted to an AdSense-powered page from Google's own servers. Would they do that? Hell, they'd be stupid not to.

Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who runs all the parts of the search engine, just put her legal team in a pickle. She told conference-goers yesterday at Fortune's Brainstorm conference that Google News, despite being advertising-free, makes $100 million in revenues a year. Fortune writer Jon Fortt explained Mayer's thinking:

Google cofounder Larry Page and Digg CEO Jay Adelson were all smiles at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley retreat. Was it because they had just wrapped up a long-rumored deal for Google to buy Digg, with the price in the neighborhood of $200 million? TechCrunch says talks are on again. (Photo by Reuters)

Marissa Mayer's high opinion of her own good taste will be getting that much more insufferable now that she can tell people that she's on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Call it Mayer's latest attempt to play the role of Peggy Guggenheim. Thing is, Guggenheim actually collected contemporary art (and contemporary artists, if the rumored romances are to be believed). The press release names Sol Lewitt, Robert Bechtle and Robert Rauschenberg as Mayer's three favorites. Only Bechtle is still breathing — at age 76.

This year's Sun Valley retreat, put on as usual by investment bank Allen & Co, will be Digg CEO Jay Adelson's second. But it marks Adelson's third or fourth trip around the block trying to sell Digg — with Allen & Co's help, naturally. Most of Digg's prior suitors — IAC, News Corp. and Al Gore's Current TV among them — are regulars at the Idaho resort. Glancing at Dealbook's photo of Adelson and Google cofounder Larry Page, we wonder: After months of lobbying from Google VP Marissa Mayer, has Google's top management finally decided to buy Digg and relieve the New York-based Adelson of his wearisome bicoastal commute? Adelson and Page's all-smiles body language in this photo strongly suggest it's so. (Photo by Reuters)

The email-newsletter headline had my business-minded editor all hot and bothered: "Yelp Goes to Google!" But no, this wasn't an oh-so-logical tuck-in acquisition of the local reviews site by the search giant. Instead, it was a sitdown with Marissa Mayer. In the interview, Mayer reveals her usual spreadsheet array of girly affectations: cupcakes! Manolos! highlights! I'm miffed about the highlights, because we have the same stylist, and as Mayer gushes like the best ladymag ingenue, "I hesitate to even say anything because she's so good and I'd hate for it to be harder for me to get an appointment." Still, cute to see her getting cozy with the review website, since if Google did take the plunge and acquire Yelp, it'd be Mayer, VP of Stuff People Actually Use, who'd make the call.

Googler parents complaining about the soaring cost of childcare should be glad that the executive in charge wasn't Marissa Mayer. This photo, taken when Google senior UI designer Kerah Pelczarski took her infant over to Aunt Marissa's Four Seasons penthouse apartment, gives one a taste. Mayer was having Seattle artist Dale Chihuly's signature colorful blown-glass art installed in November 2006. I don't know if I'm more surprised that Pelczarski let the infant play on a floor full of glass, or that Mayer let Chihuly use tertiary colors. But given Mayer's predilection for mixing business and pleasure, I have to think a Mayer-designed childcare center would have cost much more than $50,000 per student a year. Have a better caption? The best one will become the new headline. Thursday's winner: "This is how we elect the board of directors" by giddieup. (Photo by marissa)

A few of the queen's subjects across the pond have taken issue with colonial incursions by Street View spies from Google. Privacy International will whinge to the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner if they don't get a prompt response from the Mountain View rebels about the company's privacy practices — all the activists have gotten so far is cheek:

One in a while a Web application comes along that's so damn useful, even we'd invest in it. Facebook? Nah. MakeMeBabies, the site that lets you create ruddy-cheeked mashups from any two photos? Its diapers will be filled with nothing but spun gold. Here's what the site came up with from photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan. After the jump, we give a few other notable couples the same treatment. Please do add your own in the comments with our image-upload feature — best and worst fake babies will win an as-yet-undetermined prize of nominal value!

Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, the one behind the eponymous social network, has gotten engaged to boyfriend Derek Holbrook, Valleywag's youngest-ever tipster tells us. The two are shown here, in coordinated outfits, with fabulous friend Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who greenlighted Orkut's site. Will the two get married this week, now that the California Supreme Court has made it legal? No word yet, but if Mayer serves as witness, we hope she'll wear something a bit less flashy. No one — not even Marissa — shows up the grooms at their own gay wedding. (Photo by Drew Altizer via SFluxe)

What does privilege look like? This year, it was renting out an entire movie theater for your friends. But two years ago, it was a cleancut white guys playing air-fiddle on tennis rackets while singing Alabama's "Song of the South" horrificly offkey at Google society gal Marissa Mayer's birthday party, a scene captured and posted on YouTube by investor Kevin Hartz. How do we know it's Marissa, since she doesn't appear in the video? Listen closely for the really, really goofy laugh.

Google's cupcake princess, Marissa Mayer, and Kevin Rose, the playboy of the Webhead world, would make an awfully cute couple. Not romantically — the two are dating other people at the moment. But we hear Mayer is pushing hard for an acquisition of Rose's Digg, for a price below $200 million. Kara Swisher hinted a few days ago that the social news site, on which users "digg" or "bury" their favorite news headlines, might be on Google's shopping list. Mayer's goal: to use what Digg has learned to fix Google News which, while popular, doesn't make Google any money. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson would not comment on the sale rumor, but did disclose that he was having a "delicious" In 'N' Out burger for lunch.)

The Palo Alto Neiman Marcus held a preview of the Oscar de la Renta fall collection for a San Francisco Symphony benefit, and we all know how much Google's Marissa Mayer loves her some de la Renta. So she showed up with boy toy Zack Bogue (far left) and Google senior UI designer Kerah Pelczarski (second from the right), who seems to play the role of Gayle King to Mayer's Oprah Winfrey.

While Google's Marissa Mayer's instructions were for a new, tiny logo that would work well on cell phones, could there have been a subtle, even sub-conscious appeal to the many, many fans of Garth Brooks in America's heartland, where Mayer was born and raised? Her tastes run more to Dale Chihuly than Dale Earnhardt these days, but you can never quite take the country out of the girl. Because as commenter wikipin pointed out, the florid, lowercase "g" bears a striking similarity to a two-CD set of live concert recordings from the country music superstar.

The sudden appearance, in millions of browsers, of a new icon for Google was jarring to many users, though the change was slight — a capital "G" replaced by a lowercase "g". An E.E. Cummings-esque affectation? Perhaps, since the change was driven by overworked, underoccupied Google VP Marissa Mayer. She says she made her designers go through more 300 variations before settling on a lowercase blue "g". After putting her employees through the wringer, she's now outsourcing the mess to Google users But if you read Mayer's rules for an icon, though, you'll see she's set to reject anything but the one she chose.

Pictured are a pair of Faux-nolo Blahniks made from cake and icing by I Dream of Cake's Shinmin Li, size "33" in honor of Google VP Marissa Mayer's birthday at her Four Seasons penthouse. Mayer also flew in cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, the Manhattan cupcakery featured in Sex and the City, a product placement which is largely considered to have kicked off the sticky-sweet treat trend amongst the Scary Sadshaws set. According to one cupcake connoisseur familiar with Magnolia, Mayer could have gotten better desserts in San Francisco: "It's not worth flying them out from New York." But that's just the kind of fanciful display of devil-may-care wealth that Mayer is becoming increasingly well-known for. (Photo by Rachel Lea Fisher)

CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO CENTRE 9 — Where are the girls? An event producer and I both nervously paced through the lobby. Where was Marissa Mayer? The Google executive had rented a theater for the 8:50 screening of Sex and the City, but she and 300 of her closest friends were nowhere to be seen. Late, of course — have you tried to walk the block-long distance between Mayer's Four Seasons penthouse and the Westfield Centre in a pair of Manolo Blahniks? Finally, I spotted someone I knew — gorgeous Googler Brittany Bohnet, girlfriend of Facebooker Dave Morin, above. ("People are saying I look like Charlotte," said Bohnet, pictured above. "Do you think so?" Yes. Cuter than Charlotte, actually.

At this very moment, a guest tells me, Google executive Marissa Mayer is throwing a "Blahnikfest" to celebrate her birthday and the premiere of Sex and the CIty. She's rented out a theater at San Francisco's downtown Century multiplex for her friends. Is Mayer our Carrie Bradshaw? Quite possibly, though Mayer's Four Seasons penthouse is more fabulous than the Sex and the City scribe. Like the heroine, she's found love in the hunky form of Zachary Bogue — her Mr. Big, though Mayer's the one with the far more impressive resume. She turns 33 today, as we've noted, and while she normally skips birthday parties during odd years — a "quirk," she says — Bogue was out of town today. The party features cakes the exact size and shape of Bradshaw's preferred shoes, made by Shinmin Li, the owner of the Mayer-backed I Dream of Cake bakery, as well as cupcakes flown in from New York's Magnolia Bakery. The invite: