The trouble, it appears, started last week, when someone leaked news of the takeover talks to TechCrunch. Normally, such leaks come from the target—in this case, Yelp—in the hope of driving the acquisition price higher.  (Such articles are the equivalent of "Going once, going twice..." exhortations at auctions.) 

Alas, this tactic can backfire, which is why you don't see such articles appear before EVERY deal is announced.  Sometimes, when people agree to keep negotiations confidential, they actually keep them confidential.  And, sometimes, the party that doesn't leak takes the leaks personally...and cuts off the negotiations.

A few days ago, when someone cut off the Google-Yelp negotiations, the Yelp camp quickly got to work, spinning the decision to end the talks as a Yelp decision.

This provoked an unusual response from the Google camp, in the form of an article in the New York Times suggesting that Google, not Yelp, had cut off the talks.  Today, a source familiar with Google's thinking confirmed to us that Google walked because "Google is determined not to have deals negotiated through the press."

Now, it is clearly possible that both sides are furiously negotiating through the press, but at this point in the proceedings, Google is doing it better.  Yelp looks like it overplayed its hand.  And if the deal is to go through, it's now up to Yelp to go crawling back to Google and beg forgiveness.

In the meantime, however, inquiring minds want to know, who screwed up? 

Was it Yelp's management, going behind the back of their superstar banker, George Boutros (right) of Credit Suisse?  Was it a team-screwup, in which all parties agreed to use TechCrunch to try to jack the deal price up, only to watch the tactic blow up?  Or was it George himself, who underestimated the resolve of his once- and future-client, Google, and wrecked a deal for his current client, Yelp?

(Or, alternately, did Yelp roll the leak dice wisely, believing it CAN get a lot more money if it goes public or sells to someone else—a perfectly reasonable gamble that, depending on how events unfold, could just leave Google just looking Scrooge-y and embittered?)

Inquiring minds want to know!

She is on Twitter, at least; not only does she follow the Google CEO on her @teflonblondie account, but the Burson Marsteller flack also tracks him on the much more selective @momnet, where he joins Demi Moore as one of just five followed accounts. We've been told the @momnet account is Simon's, and that seems obvious enough: It's owned by "marcy" and Simon retweets its content the very instant it goes online.

Her relationship with the nominally married Schmidt, whether professional or something more, does seem to be humming along again: Our tipster says the pair were spotted together in Los Angeles, at the opening of The Little Seed, the organic cosmetics company co-owned by Punky Brewster actress Soleil Moon Frye, who Simon and Schmidt both follow on Twitter.

As interesting as Simon's make-up shopping may be, we're more intrigued in the bridal jewelry retailer she's become a fan of on Facebook. A client? A friend's shop? Or is something more interesting brewing? We might feel uneasy asking such a personal question if this wasn't totally innocent, public information (per Facebook), and if virtuous people like Simon had any use for secrets (they don't, per Schmidt).

Google is in advanced talks to pay around $500 million for Yelp, according to a story from TechCrunch confirmed by the New York Times, which described the talks in straightforward business terms: "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States."

But Yelp isn't just any online content startup. It wields disproportionate power over local merchants, from restaurants to auto body shops, and said merchants have repeatedly told tales of Yelp offering to let them re-arrange reviews if they took out ads — and of disappearing positive reviews in retaliation when they complained about the ethics of the situation. The San Francisco-area alt-weekly East Bay Express ran a series of articles on such practices, and the story eventually went national.

One business owner got so frustrated with Yelp users — and Yelp Inc.'s passive aggressive handling of her — that she ended up in a wrestling match with a reviewer she had flamed on email.

The company is also known for its raging, drunken, fleshy user parties, which are thrown, alternately, by the company itself and by the restaurants subject to its users' reviews.

Google has already seen its reputation as the "Don't Be Evil" internet company erode significantly, most recently after CEO Eric Schmidt said people should consider not having secrets, a story that spread widely online and in the news media. If it's going to seduce Yelp, Google should make sure its remaining friends know the company plans to reform its new toy rather than join its caddish pursuits.

(Top pics: Yelp co-founder Russel Simmons has fun with an employee at a Yelp holiday party, from this Valleywag post.)

The Google vice president's three-day wedding was anchored at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, and involved command performances by the rock band The Killers and renowned chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, as we reported yesterday. Vogue, eagerly fed event details by fashion-obsessed Mayer, adds the detail that the actual ceremony took place on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, and was followed by a custom fireworks display.

Vongerichten prepared lobster and beef tenderloin, Vogue adds, followed by cake from New York baker Ron Ben-Israel, making the wedding feast something of a shut out for all those Michelin-starred local chefs. As for the clothes:

• Wedding dress by Naeem Khan, who did Michelle Obama's first state dinner dress and has outfitted Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé for events. Vogue said the dress included "a bodice crocheted and embroidered in snowflake lace" and was paired with "a floor-length bridal coat."
  
• Veil by Carolina Herrera.
  
• Shoes: Mary Jane by Stuart Wietzman "with a blue crystal design on the instep."
  
• Groom Zach Bogue wore a Broni tux and a "somewhat funky" shirt from Etro.
  
• Bridesmaids were in jewel-tone dresses from Reem Acra.'
  
• Mayer's ivory "going-away number" was based on something Jackie Kennedy wore when touring India.

So just your typical three-day wedding with fireworks, The Killers, Jean-George catering and a spread in Vogue. The pictures, we'd wager, will be forthcoming in Vogue's print edition. But someone must have some casual snaps in the meantime, not to mention more information about that singing toast from Google exec Craig Silverstein. Data to ryan@valleywag.com.

• The Killers. The rock/synth-pop bad played for Mayer and her guests Friday night at San Francisco club Bimbo's. Mayers' friends tried to Twitter discreetly about the private performance; others around town caught wind of the show but the not the bride.
  
• Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Vongerichten is considered one of the world's best chefs and is proprietor of, among other establishments, an eponymous restaurant in New York with three Michelin stars. He doesn't have a restaurant in San Francisco, however, which makes it all the more remarkable that Mayer brought his culinary services into the SF Four Seasons, where she lives and the home base for her nuptial celebration. Rumors of his presence at the hotel have already begun to circulate.
  
• Singing toaster: Mayer was serenaded by Google co-worker Craig Silverstein in a singing toast. Anyone have further details?
• Mystery pastry chef: Also something of a star, apparently, though we don't know who it is yet.
  

Mayer is an obsessive and data-driven planner in her role as VP for search products at Google. She also loves Oscar de la Renta and having her own fashion spreads in Glamour and Vogue. So it's no surprise her wedding was such an elaborate affair, from the ornate, velvety invitation boxes right through to the celebrity catering. Husband Bogue, a hunky investment manager one year her junior, is no doubt accustomed to handling the pressure of such complex, high pressure events.

Many of Mayer's friends seemed similarly in sync with Mayer, tweeting infrequently during the three-day affair in a nod to Mayers' privacy (not to mention her intense security policies).



Speaking of which: We've yet to find any pictures from the wedding. Mayer banned outside photography, one source tells us. If you have one, or can answer any of the questions above, or know the names of the more prominent guests, I'd love to hear from you.

Oh, and Marissa, Zach: Congratulations!

(Top pic: Mayer at New York's Carnegie Hall in November, accepting a "2009 Women of the Year" award from Glamour. Getty Images.)

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

Instead, it was an Apple iPhone that the couture coder, fresh off her latest fashion-mag spread, showed to TechCrunch's Robin Wauters backstage at LeWeb:

Wauters: By the way, thank you for showing me your Google Phone backstage.



Mayer: (laughs) I didn't, that was my iPhone. And you know I can't comment on speculation.

Google's most stylish executive (by a mile) using the iPhone when she could lug a Droid, running Google's Android OS, or the mythic G-Phone, expected to be branded by Google directly? That's comment enough right there.

(Pic: An earlier incident of iPhone brandishing: Mayer shows off her Jesus-phone in 2007, when the device was brand new and Google had yet to release its Android phone OS. By Tamar Weinberg.)

Schmidt once dismissed Twitter as a "poor man's email system." But as the microblogging service has picked up more users, more activity and more search traffic, Google has been forced to take it more seriously. Today, Schmidt's engineers announced that Twitter-style "real-time" searching of tweets would be integrated into Google's core search service. I guess that's what you'd call a Poor Man's Real Time Search Engine, mmmm? Whoops.

Even worse, Schmidt's attempt to join Twitter itself proved something of a disaster this morning. He first logged on with the handle "eschmidt0", prompting a cyber-diss from high-profile New York tech executive Anil Dash:

Oh, snap! Surely a big-time CEO wouldn't let a zinger like that get under his skin right?

Except that within a few hours Schmidt had duly changed his handle and moved over his old content:

It looks like Schmidt also received some help from the Poor Man's Email Service's Rich Man's Identity Authenticator, because he's now got a "Verified Account." Throwing his (semi-)celebrity weight around at Twitter Inc.? Schmidt's starting to get the swing of things. Now just tweet about your next lunch choice, Eric. We promise not to mock. Too hard.

Mayers' three-day nuptials at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, were announced via an elborate invitation, a heavy red box covered in a velvety material, as we've reported previously. That sounded about right for the fashion-conscious overachiever.

The Google VP's obsessiveness apparently extends to security, as well: The invitations indicate guests are to keep some sort of ID card on them at all times during the weekend, we're now told.

And said guests aren't sure what this means: Are these "smart" cards implanted with radio "RFID" tags? If so, guests could theoretically be tracked across a 135-foot radius with a stationary receiver. Or maybe they'll be simple credit-card-style tokens with a magnetic stripe, swiped on demand. Or maybe former cheerleader Mayer has something more festive and creative in mind. If you've got a clue, do share it with us.

Requiring that guests basically wear a tracking tag will certainly further the image of Google as Big Brother. The search giant tracks a staggering amount of personal data, and company executives have lately been clumsy in answering mounting media questions about the info-hoard. Then again, some of Mayers' guests will be fellow Google executives; perhaps having a taste of their own medicine will have a moderating effect on the data Google collects.

Speaking of which: Though Mayer is employee number 20 at Google and has great power within the company, it's not at all clear that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be in attendance at her wedding. Mayer was not invited to Page's private-island wedding to Lucy Southworth, a source close to the event tells us, so she could hardly be expected to invite Page to her bash.

In any case, a tracking scheme will certainly help Mayer keep out the likes of Valleywag as her wedding party makes its way around the Four Seasons, even as it reinforces her rep as something of a data-hungry cyborg. No worries Marissa; we'll try not to take it out on your gift.

(Pic: Mayer, by Esther Dyson)

The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

Didn't they think it was fishy when Google credited 11 inventors on two continents in its newly-issued patent? That's a lot of brainpower for child's play, and even for, as the patent calls it, a broader "WEB-BASED SYSTEM FOR GENERATION OF INTERACTIVE GAMES BASED ON DIGITAL VIDEOS." (Thanks to commenter theodp for pointing the patent out to us.)

Google illustrated the patent with pictures of the age-old kids game "rocks, paper, scissors," and described some very boring uses, like:

Clicking on an annotation corresponding to a 'rock', "paper", or "scissors" menu item leads to separate video or portion of the same video depicting a tie, a win, or a loss, respectively, each outcome potentially leading to the display of additional annotations representing a second round of the game.

Whatever. This will be used immediately for porn. And even though that sort of thing is not allowed on YouTube per se, Google will earn further insane riches on the royalties.

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

And by "Google Phone" we don't simply mean another Android handset. We're talking about Google-branded hardware running a version of Android we haven't yet seen.

Over the next few weeks, Google Phones (most probably in early, prototype form) will flood the Mountain View campus. They'll don large LCDs while running a new version of Android—either Flan or the version of Android beyond it—which our source spotted running on Google's handset as well as a laptop. (Whatever the software was, it most certainly wasn't Chrome OS, we were assured.)

But maybe the most intriguing bit is what someone said to our source offhandedly, that the current Android, the we all know and love, is not the "real" Android. So what makes for a "real" version of Android?

Our best guess is an Android OS with Google Voice at its heart.

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

According to quotes compiled by blogger Dan Lyons, Dodge used to say things like "Microsoft is a great company to work for" is "always putting employees first." But he's changed his tune, now that he works for Google. A new post on his personal blog starts with this dig at his old employer:

Laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits isnot cool. But hey, thanks for pushing me on to the Next Big Thing.

And suddenly, Dodge has a new viewpoint about Gmail. Before:

Even Microsoft's online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail... Gmail... doesn't compare to Microsoft Outlook.

Now:

Outlook... was getting kind of tired. Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context... One other subtle thing: no spam. I never realized how much corporate spam invaded my Microsoft inbox.

But he "realizes" now!

Thanks for all the "thanks," Don, but the "fuck you" is still implied. Not that we're complaining.

(Pic: Dodge, by Jay Goldman)