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You know Google's a different kind of company when the slightest evidence of a slowdown prompts big headlines and feverish speculation about the future of its leaders. First, CEO Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg that the company has decided to (gasp!) reduce its rate of hiring. In fact, the search megalith only added 519 employees to its payroll last quarter, compared with more than 2,000 in the same period a year ago.

Google is everywhere. At least, it is in David Carr's life. On Sunday, the New York Times media columnist described the slow, inexorable process by which he came to use Google for almost everything he does online. It started with search, of course, but soon metastasized to e-mail, calendars, Google Maps, subway navigation, and Google Reader for RSS feeds. Moreover, Google didn't accomplish this with an aggressive advertising and promotional campaign; it did it simply by being so damn good.

For years, Google has resisted incorporating human input into its search method, relying instead on its ultra-secret algorithms to rank the results. Now, the company has taken its first step toward letting users customize search results themselves. With SearchWiki, a new service announced by Google yesterday, users can set up a Google account and rearrange the search results to reflect your own personal priorities.

As part of Google's effort to "organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," the company has embarked upon a remarkable partnership with Time Inc., the owner of the Life magazine archives. Starting yesterday, Google has begun digitizing and posting the entire collection of Life photographs, some 10 million pictures dating back to the 1880s.

We suppose it was just a matter of time once the Google deal died. According to the New York Times, the resignation of Jerry Yang as chief executive officer of Yahoo has been in the works for quite some time. Then again, the decision was also reportedly "mutual" on the part of Yang and the board of directors, a claim we find at least a little suspect.

The meltdown may have knocked Google's stock down to the $300 mark, but that hasn't stopped the company from rolling out killer apps. Today, it's Google Voice, a new service for the iPhone that employs voice-recognition technology to let you speak search queries directly into your phone. Say you've just finished coveting your neighbor's ox, and you feel just rotten about it.

In New York Magazine's profile of Malcolm Gladwell, the celebrity quirkmeister declares, "Google is the answer to the problem we didn't have. It doesn't tell you what's interesting or what's important.

For years, Google has used search queries to calculate business, marketing, and entertainment trends around the country; since 2006, ordinary users have been able to access these data and see what the population is interested in at any given time to measure the country's collective fears and desires. Now, the company has put this information to work combating one of the most persistent and often lethal problems in America: the common flu.

Perhaps you can see a pattern here.

Sometime today, YouTube is expected to announce a new partnership with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios to post MGM's movies on the Web site. The deal will start slowly, with a small selection of movies and old TV series like American Gladiator. Will it really take off, and will Google finally find a way to make serious money on the site? The odds are already long.

While Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been prepping for Barack Obama's economic summit, co-founder Larry Page appeared yesterday with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, hawking the new possibilities of "white spaces," or unused parts of the television spectrum.

So the deal is dead. After months of negotiations with the Justice Department and growing opposition from just about everyone, Google pulled out of its proposed search ad arrangement with Yahoo yesterday. Attorneys with the Justice Department notified Google executives that they planned to sue to stop the deal, and Google just couldn't bring itself to fight it out in court.