In its incalculable data mining and indexing, Google has managed to distill our national identity:

The front page of Google Finance moments ago:

The story is Johnny Depp’s surprise appearance as Captain Jack Sparrow at an English school, which was very sweet, but probably not market-moving.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Search engine giant Google announced today the launch of their newest web-based “app”– a free, decision making service called Google Will which completely eliminates any need for users to exercise judgment or free will in any element of their lives.

Co-founder and President, Products Larry Page remarked,

Sure, Google has made it extremely cheap, easy and fast to find any piece of information you could possibly desire to obtain. But the challenge remains– what do you do with that information? Human judgment is fallible, fickle, and making difficult decisions is unnecessarily stressful and exhausting.

Today, we are excited to introduce the solution, built upon Google’s best-in-class technology and infrastructure– Google Will.

Google has already mapped the neural networks of every user of our products, so why not deploy that information in a truly transformative technology that will completely eliminate the need to exercise free will?

In our beta testing, Google Will has arrived at the same conclusions as our human subjects 80% of the time, but much more rapidly and without all the ambivalence and self-doubt.

When asked if there would be an opt-out provision, Page deferred to CEO Eric Schmidt, who replied,

Listen, we are a publicly traded company and we have a large shareholder base that needs a return on their investment. We expect Google Will to be the cornerstone of our revenue strategy for at least the next century. So at this point we’re not comfortable saying whether Google users will be permitted to opt-out.

Page added,

Remember that our motto is, “Don’t Be Evil.” So you know this won’t end badly.

Oh, thanks Google! It’s the birthday of some guy who’s apparently associated with Popeye.

The Internet was inaccessible for several hours today after a man in Webster Groves, Missouri typed the string “Google” into the popular Google search engine, triggering a circular reference (or “infinite loop”).

The infinitely looping search sequence consumed much of the Internet’s bandwidth until a team of Google engineers was able to stop it early this afternoon by replacing the proprietary Google search algorithm with a list of abandoned websites known as “Yahoo.”