Sergey Brin's Panicking! Unless He's Not

Your nonstory of the day has got to be rumors that Google (GOOG) cofounder Sergey Brin is panicking at the thought of Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing overtaking his search engine. The story first got going in the pages of the New York Post, which claimed that Brin is so terrified at what Bing can do that he has personally assembled a team to dissect Bing's search algorithm, find out what makes it tick, and upgrade Google pronto, lest Microsoft destroy everything he's worked so hard to build.

Although the Post emblazoned its story with the headline "Fear Grips Google," it was also good enough to call the company and ask for a comment. "We always have a team working on improving search," said a Google spokesman. "Our algorithm is constantly evolving." And what do you know? That happens to be true!

Since the Post "story" broke, Googlewatchers have spent their idle hours wondering how this thing could have gotten so much play. CNet blogger Chris Matyszczyk has a notion that Newscorp. owner Rupert Murdoch's wife is browbeating him into hanging out with hip young kids like Larry and Sergey, and Brin used his new buddy to insert a story that showed Google as something other than an 800-pound gorilla. "When you're perceived as being a little bit of a, well, monopoly ... might you just be tempted to find a nicely engineered way of slipping that story out there just to improve the way you are regarded?" he writes "It's a little like movies of the last 15 years or so in which the male protagonist has to show his vulnerable side to get the girl." (Honestly, the only think more fun than reading overblown tech stories is reading meta-analysis of overblown tech stories.)

Although he's hardly as purple as Matyszczyk, Information Week reporter Thomas Claburn makes a similar point: if Bing were to eat into Google's share of search just a tad, that could a long way toward getting the government off its back. "Google would probably be happy to lose a few points of search market share to Bing if it meant the government would back down," he writes.

Meanwhile, here's a story that actually breaks a little news: Google is getting into microblogging search. The blog Google Operating System reports that the company has set up an online placeholder for a new tool to index and rank microblogging search results, getting into the game that Twitter started. This rumor is about as thin as the Post's, but as Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson points out, at least it has the whiff of truth about it. Google execs Marissa Mayer, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt have all declared interest in setting up Twitter Searches; this may simply be the first anyone's seen of it outside the GooglePlex.