It may be reaching ubiquity, but Google has just scratched the surface of the Web. In fact, computer scientist Weiyi Meng at Binghamton University is already working on Google’s replacement: a search engine that can give you straightforward answers to questions like “Who is Einstein,” instead of simply listing relevant URLs.

The metasearch engine would tap into the million or so search engines around the world, and present a more complete and accurate list of search results by searching the “deep Internet.” While the surface Web—the part of the Web that is indexed by search engines—has about 60 billion pages, the deep Web has about 900 billion pages—and because Google has not been designed to dig deeper, many of those pages are out of reach.

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Sure, Google can map just about anything. But who knew it could actually influence geography from the ground up?

The French coastal town of Eu is getting no Internet love, and its mayor is about to do something about it. Marie-Françoise Gaouyer believes that the decline in tourism—down by as much as a third—is the result of the town’s poor standing in “Eu” Google searches. So, she’s advocating to change the name of the town on the belief that additional syllables will increase its Internet visibility. Her decision to act was triggered when even the French national railway’s computer system did not recognize Eu’s existence.

Instead of tourist accommodations, Google currently yields sites related to the European Union or, for French searches, to the past participle of the verb “avoir.” Gaouyer thinks that to increase awareness of Eu among potential tourists, she can either pay search engines like Google to place the town at the top of “Eu” searches, or simply change the town’s name.

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Is “Don’t Be Evil” Google in fact a sinister pollution-spewing machine? A Sunday Times article cited new research by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, claiming that every Google search emits 7 grams of CO2, about half the amount released from boiling a kettle of water (15 grams). It portrays Google as “secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint” and refusing to “divulge” the locations of its power-sucking data centers.

There’s more:

When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.

It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

The article also implicates other online activities, like Twittering or maintaining an avatar in Second Life (by one estimate, that avatar uses almost as much electricity as the average citizen of Brazil).

Google promptly put out a response on their blog challenging Wissner-Gross’ claims and touting the company’s green credentials. Each search emits a mere 0.2 grams of CO2, says Google.  Besides, isn’t online searching greener than driving to the library?

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Musical acts have a similar epidemiology as the flu. Both start out as small, localized phenomena and then gain momentum with surprising speed, until everyone is hacking up the same virus and every radio station is blaring the same tune. Google caught on recently and created Flu Trends, which tracks the spread of the flu by charting user searches for flu-related words. And a team of Israeli researchers have come up with software that uses similar logic to predict the next big musical act.

This “music trends” software tracks searches for songs or bands on Gnutella, a giant peer-to-peer file sharing network, and locates where the searches are generated. Since new bands often develop popularity through local gigs (“American Idol” is an exception), the software works because it can tracks momentum of grassroots movements. Based on the local ranking of the searches and how fast these rankings change, the software can predict the next breakout band.

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While doctors may gripe about the increasing number of patients that arrive in their offices with WebMD printouts and search-engine-assisted self diagnoses, Google sees it as opportunity. Today, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of the Google monster) unveiled Google Flu Trends, a web tool that will track flu outbreaks based on user-generated search terms.

Flu Trends works because the Google search box is so often the first place people turn at the first sign of a sniffle. The company says Flu Trends could alert users to flu activity in their area up to two weeks ahead of traditional systems like emergency room reports.

The New York Times reports:

To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.

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· The “Father of the internet” says the Web will run out of IP addresses in 2010.

· Chances are, if you’re reading this, you spend 25 percent of your time doing personal tasks online at work.

· Google’s Tenth Birthday contest: The five best ideas to help as many people around the world as possible will get a total of $10 million in funding. Hurry! Submissions are due by October 20th.

· Dear Sarah Palin: In case you hadn’t noticed, a village in Alaska is melting.

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The higher you go, the windier it gets—wind at high altitudes is more abundant and consistent than the airflow at ground level. That’s a gold mine for those seeking to harness wind energy. But our standard turbines, behemoth windmills with heavy spinning blades, can only be built so high. So how do you get “up where the air is clear” and the wind rarely stops? You fly a kite.

In a recent experiment, Dutch researchers say they flew a 10-square-meter kite and created enough energy to power 10 houses. The kite is attached to a generator by a string; it generates power by pulling the string and turning the generator as the wind lifts it higher in the sky. Study leader Wubbo Ockels (who’s a former astronaut) says he then turns the kite so that it loses lift and descends, allowing the process to repeat. If the researchers had to use a lot of extra energy to pull the kite back down, the technique wouldn’t be nearly as promising.

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·Who wants an electric scooter? Two weeks ago the answer was Paris taxi drivers; this week it’s Providence, R.I., police officers.

·For a cool $10,000, you too could have a glorious piece of geek decor: the Periodic Coffee Table.

·“Einstein was wrong, and I can prove it!”—rating the minds of fringe scientists.

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When Google Street View was released less than a year ago, its 360-degree panoramic shots from ground level changed the way people explored new cities (along with providing a Web-based haven for people watching). Now, Google is taking this technology to a higher level (har) with Google Sky, an Internet tool that brings you unlimited online stargazing opportunities. Google Sky lets you traipse amongst the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies, and even switch to microwave and infrared views. And if you’re not having luck finding anything cool yourself (there’s a lot of nothing out there), you can head to the image galleries, which take you to some sweet shots from the Hubble, Chandra X-Ray, GALEX UV, and Spitzer infrared scopes.

The tool is a bit slow, so if you’re not the biggest fan of watching images load you can download the Google Earth application for free, which includes Google Sky as an additional feature.

Image: Google