Google isn’t just in a war with Facebook, it’s at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles. And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard. Entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Ben Horowitz laid the groundwork for this in his post Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO, saying Larry Page “seems to have determined that Google is moving into war and he clearly intends to be a wartime CEO. This will be a profound change for Google and the entire high-tech industry.” Horowitz is exactly right.

Google’s Six-Front War

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But the other thing that we’re doing that’s more strategic is we’re trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer. And we now have enough artificial intelligence technology and enough scale and so forth that we can, for example, give you — literally compute the right answer.

Eric “Doc Brown” Schmidt

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Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was “you write a lot of code” and “get things done” was “that code shipped in the product/project.” Fundamentally they didn’t have any way to judge or evaluate the ‘goodness’ of what someone did if it wasn’t writing code. Designers don’t write a lot of code and they don’t generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accommodating that. And if you’re “good” at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That’s not measurable either.

I Was A Googler, And Boy Did We Suck At Hiring

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In terms of being the baddest MoFo in the market Apple has no peer, but Apple is following its own very different course. Apple isn’t the next Microsoft, you see. Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Google is the next Microsoft, so Google is seen by Ballmer as the immediate threat — the one he has a hope in hell of actually doing something about.

Why Microsoft bought Skype

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If all online searches are literal, what happens to the headlines that involve a play on words? Are those headlines relegated to the print edition, where headline writers have a captive audience? Indeed, as newspapers embrace search engine optimization, and as young journalists are taught to value Google visibility above all else, many copy editors fear that funny headlines are quickly going the way of the classified ad.

‘Google Doesn’t Laugh’: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO

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Most Google Doodles are tied to holidays, historical events or iconic figures from history. Some are regional in nature, others are global. You can find a list of them here. Given their broad nature, most of the searches that the Doodles link to tend to rank Wikipedia articles very highly. Therefore, if we look at the amount of traffic these Wikipedia pages get on Doodle Day, we can get a sense for just how powerful they are as a traffic driver.

How Much Traffic Does a Google Doodle Drive? The Data Says, A Ton

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Google has been ordered [by a Belgian appeals court] to remove any and all links to articles and photos from all Belgian newspapers (in German or French — as the article notes, the Flemish papers have no apparent problem with Google News). Google execs seem understandably bewildered by the decision.

Belgian Appeals Court Says Google Must Pay Up For Linking To Newspaper Websites

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