Sam Levin

From left to right, Google CEO Larry Page, Cornell President David Skorton, Technion's Director Craig Gotsman, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Move aside, Silicon Valley! Or, you know, watch your back. New York City is trying to compete with the tech-y town to be the tech center of the universe -- and Google is helping.

(FYI: New York City is still second to Silicon Valley, but it's trying!)

Today, Mayor Mike Bloomberg joined Google CEO Larry Page and Cornell President David Skorton to announce that Google will be doing something outside of its typical scope of activities: providing space for a temporary university campus in New York City.

As a central part of its Applied Sciences initiative -- aimed at attracting industry jobs and startups and expanding the Big Apple as a tech hub -- the city is building a campus on Roosevelt Island for CornellNYC Tech, an engineering and applied science campus that will be run by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

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Looks like Bruce Willis's mining team from Armageddon could be employed again. More >>

You can run, but you can't hide -- just like Sandra Bullock in The Net (OMG!) : Google knows all about you (or thinks it does, at least.)

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A little-known Google product called "Buzz" is finally being put out of its misery. Our experience of Google Buzz: we clicked on it accidentally one time when trying to click on our inbox. They're also getting rid of iGoogle, which, no idea.

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Google Doodles are often inspired, but rarely are they as fun as today's celebrating the day that would have marked Jim Henson's 75th Birthday.

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Keen eyes will notice a link on the bottom of Gmail's welcome page, a link that opens a new world that will change your old one forever. It simply reads, "Coming soon: A new sign-in page!" If you elect to click "Preview It," you will essentially take the red pill and leave your old, ignorant body behind. After the jump, pictures of the old sign-in page compared to the new one. Use caution: Your precious worldview is in danger.

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Google has launched Google+, a social networking service they hope will compete with Facebook and eventually destroy it and reduce Mark Zuckerberg to the sniveling street urchin he once was. Google+, which can only be accessed by invited guests as of today, has stressed its focus on privacy, an issue many users still complain about with Facebook. What else is going on with Google+? Is it easy to use? What kind of features does it have? What does it smell like? Let's take a look.

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About 20 people were battling for a chance to work for Google, one of the richest, most powerful and best employers in all the land, but seven people were cut from the hiring contest along the way, like some type of cutthroat Mark Burnett production. But everyone removed just happened to be an overweight woman, noted a secret Jezebel source. That set off some alarm bells: in the logic exam portion of Google Olympics, two out of three questions were about fitness, and when another (overweight) woman asked about the scoring, she was told the results weren't about the score, but about "the overall person." By the end, "There was not one fat person left in the pool," says the source -- they had "separated out the fatties." Google says they "don't discriminate," as lawyers far and wide start to feel their palms itching. [Jezebel]

Every once in a while Google likes to surprise us with a treat, a little gem on their homepage that makes searching the internet fun. In honor of the birthday of Les Paul, the Google Doodle today is a working guitar, encouraging every asshole in the office to take a stab at "Stairway to Heaven" for a few hours while they wait for 5 p.m. to roll around. While this is definitely one of the more annoying Google Doodles, it's also one of the most creative, which made us reflect back on our own favorites. Our top 5 after the jump!

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A secretive story has been bubbling in Silicon Valley this week, in which the PR firm Burson-Marsteller pitched anti-Google articles to national newspapers on behalf of some unnamed client. Google, they claimed, has privacy issues that the American people should know about -- but it was far from that pure. The PR company went to journalists and bloggers, even telling them that they would do the work; all they needed was someone's name to stick up top. USA Today, The Huffington Post, and Politico were all potential targets. Today, Dan Lyons of the Daily Beast reports that it was all on behalf of Facebook, a company that, as we all know well, has some privacy issues of its own. Details about the brewing scandal inside Press Clips, our daily media column.

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