Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that most people think the Singleton speech was aimed at the search giant and its burgeoning power over the distribution of media, although Google was not named by him.

Still, it’s always nice to make nice. Sort of.

So, it was hard to resist translating this Google (GOOG) blog by one of its lawyers.

Google wrote: Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Posted by Alexander Macgillivray, Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property

Translation: Questions? Someone has questions about our practices? OK, we will answer them only to assuage the panic among the little brains about our size and power over IP.

But remember: They don’t call us Googzilla for nothing!

Google wrote: Yesterday I entered the following search in Google News: [Phish in mountain view]. The search results led me to click on this headline, which took me to the full story by the San Jose Mercury News about Phish’s upcoming concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Translation: Hey, we might seem like geeks over here at the Googleplex, chomping on organic flax crackers and making up scary algorithms, but we know of this hip Phish phenom. We looked it up under “hip” on Google!

[Complete digression: BoomTown was in a car pool with the very sweet Trey Anastasio for many years in middle school, and he was not such a hipster then!]

Google wrote: Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month. These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international–day and night.

Translation: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Google wrote: And once a reader is on the newspaper’s site, we work hard to help them earn revenue. Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns.

Translation: Money makes the world go around,
the world go around, the world go around,
Money makes the world go around,
it makes the world go round.

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound,
a buck or a pound, a buck or a pound,
Is all that makes the world go around,
that clinking clanking sound,
Can make the world go round.

Google wrote: The Associated Press (AP) recently issued a press release announcing plans to develop an initiative to “protect” the newspaper industry’s content online. Since then, some readers, users and journalists have asked us if the AP’s plan is about Google since we host complete AP articles. The answer is that it doesn’t appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama’s visit to Turkey.

Translation: Ain’t nobody here but us chickens!

Hey, we pay up some! Not a lot! But some. I mean, YouTube doesn’t pay up and it has tons of content on the site that is not theirs.

Wait, we own YouTube. Forget that example.

Back to chickens. Nobody here!

Google wrote: We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models–whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions. In all cases, for news articles we’ve crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more–the headline, a “snippet” of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher’s website.

Translation: Hey, we only give consumers a little smackeral, in the lingo of the great Winnie the Pooh. Well, yes, that bear does always end up gobbling all the honey. Forget that example.

Back to chickens then, but chickens with an advertising-supported business model!

Google wrote: In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find [pdf]. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index–all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.

Translation: Oh yes, the fine print. Legal stuff–fair use, transformative, indexing. In other words, we’re covered, and 3,476 Washington lobbyists have our back.

But hey, here is some technical stuff and we’ll also take it out–all you have to do is ask, although it will effectively make you undiscoverable for all of time!

And, if you do then want us to take it out, comb through our gazillions of search results to find your stuff, over and over and over again, like gerbils on a treadmill. We totally hope that does not exhaust you in every way possible.

Google wrote: As for Phish in Mountain View this summer, asking will get you nowhere because the tickets are already sold out.

Translation: Also, for anyone keeping score, Phish owes us too, since no one would have found tickets without us. Google HQ is right smack up against Shoreline Amphitheatre, so we are watching.

So let’s review: Ozymandias, King of Kings. Chickens. Smackeral. Hip.

Nothing to see here, so please enjoy this lovely Phish video of “Bouncing Around the Room” from YouTube (relax, it’s from their official channel):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

According the latest meme to sweep the digerati over the last several days, here are the words that should make the brainiac satraps over at Google very, very nervous: “See what’s happening–right now.”

That’s the motto right below the box on Twitter’s search engine–a page that looks awfully familiar to anyone who uses the Internet, since it is essentially a light-blue-colored rip-off of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” mantra.

But, posits the new theory, it’s Google (GOOG) that should perhaps not be feeling so lucky when it comes to Twitter search because it is becoming the place for what is now being called “real-time” search.

Yesterday there was a Silicon Alley Insider piece alarmingly titled “Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?” by former AOLer John Borthwick–who should know a thing or two about the topic, given that he was a top exec at the once-vaunted online service as it imploded.

In it, relating a presentation to AOL execs in their heyday by the well-known management author, Clay Christensen, here’s Borthwick’s money quote:

[Christensen] said time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger–the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, it’s often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled–I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.”

Having written an entire book about the disaster that became AOL, I would have to disagree a lot with Borthwick that the innovation of broadband killed the company.

For example, I would have started with AOL’s ponzi-scheme of an advertising business model, gross mismanagement, greed, backstabbing between Time Warner (TWX) and AOL after the merger and a complete noninterest in innovation in AOL’s later years as the key reasons for its demise, before I even got to broadband.

That aside, Borthwick does go on to make an interesting argument I have been hearing a lot of late among the digerati: that Twitter’s search results–and not its often-inane tweets–are its real treasure.

An investor in a start-up called Summize that was acquired by Twitter and is now its search engine, Borthwick correctly focuses on some interesting splintering off of two key search areas, video and real-time search.

Google already owns plain-vanilla search in a game-over way, with a disturbing share that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

And, given Google’s ownership of YouTube and the fact that the online video service massively dominates the online video market, the search giant effectively owns video search. (One might note that it has been, heretofore ineffectively, hard at work trying to monetize it.)

But it is Twitter, as it quickly increases its user base from one million to three million to six million–and, doubtlessly, millions more now–that is the king of real-time search, which is to say, search that is done as news events unfold (the plane in the Hudson River, an earthquake, the Super Bowl, whatever) or other ongoing topics of the day.

Thus, while Google essentially controls the pages of about everything on the Internet, Twitter owns the social conversation online.

Writes Borthwick:

Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson–today–weeks after the event, Google is replete with results–but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues–lipstick on pig?–for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch–on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.”

Unfortunately, after that, except just stating that Google will inevitably fall over and die, because of the Twitter effect, Borthwick provides absolutely no explanation of what possible business model could make real-time search that kind of killer.

Will it be a text-based online advertising model like Google’s AdSense? Or are people who Twitter and search Twitter not as open to such ads when they are conversing?

Or could Twitter sell the analytics from these social searches to big brands, so they can do a deep dive into consumer behavior? Or is the bulk of that chatter–like, say, “Cheetos are yummy, but messy”–completely useless to them?

Does Twitter winning in real-time search mean no one wants regular Web search anymore? Or can both co-exist and be lucrative?

“Who knows?” is probably a better answer to all of this at this point, given how nascent and small the Twitter audience–save for in the noisy echo chamber of Silicon Valley and the media, where it looms large–still is.

That’s not to say I don’t use Twitter search more and more or that it’s probably a whole lot easier to monetize the start-up’s search than the content of its 140 characters.

Said a Twitter insider who is watching its search business grow a lot and notes that it is much bigger than people realize: “The search results are distinct to anything out there.”

That is true, and I would also say it is extremely useful too (even though bigger will inevitably make it less so, as there will be more dreck to slog through).

That’s why Facebook, as first reported here, made that $500 million run at Twitter and also why it opened its APIs on status this week to slow Twitter’s growth and cut its momentum a bit.

But Facebook also made the move to help itself. After all, many more young people–for all Twitter’s buzz–use its status update (ask some–I did), so it is in Facebook’s interest to keep it that way.

Of course, Google could also try to kill Twitter, by starting its own real-time search service, although that is the kind of innovative and viral thing that big companies usually cannot pull off as easily or deftly.

And it would come as no surprise if Google made an even larger bid for Twitter, given its interest in owning all search.

Or not, if Twitter can’t find a way to make real and sustained money from any of its many interesting parts, like search.

I, for one, hope it does, since it’d be nice to see someone tweet, um, tweak, the mighty Google for once, even if it does not have murder in mind.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Previously, BoomTown decoded the first mean Saturday letter, sent at the beginning of April by Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang, in which Ballmer threatened to go hostile with his unsolicited takeover bid.

But this new one sent yesterday is a such a doozy that it cannot be ignored.

Thus, we wade in with really big boots.

Ballmer wrote: May 3, 2008

Dear Jerry:

Translation: Saturday, bloody Saturday. Redux!

Ballmer wrote: After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo.

Translation: It just occurred to me today that maybe you don’t like us and I am bereft. Despite copious evidence that I am, well, somewhat of a bully, do you know that I am really a very sensitive man and cry big sloppy tears when I am all by myself alone?

Ballmer wrote: I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

Translation: You like Google (GOOG) better, I see that now. All those times when I thought you were dealing with my unsolicited offer for Yahoo, all you were thinking of was Larry and Sergey, Larry and Sergey, Larry and Sergey.

I feel foolish now for throwing my tens of billions at you.

Ballmer wrote: I am disappointed that Yahoo has not moved toward accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on Jan. 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62% premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

Translation: When I called you on Jan. 31, I thought you would jump at the chance to get a 62% premium. Was it too much? Should I have been more withholding?

Ballmer wrote: In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70% compared to the price at which your stock closed on Jan. 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33 offer.

Translation: And still, it’s not enough. As Miss Aretha Franklin sings: “A little respect (sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me)/Whoa, babe (just a little bit)/A little respect (just a little bit).

Oh, snap!

Ballmer wrote: Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

Translation: Marbles. Taking my. Home going.

And if you like Google so much, why don’t you marry it? (If you do, of course, my lobbyists in Washington will be at the ready to pounce!)

Ballmer wrote: – First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

– It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Translation: Don’t you realize AdSense is only the beginning?

Don’t you see that Google will become self-aware in 2012 and start to build cybernetic organisms (living tissue over a metal endoskeleton) to send back and hunt down our future human leaders?

Don’t you know “Don’t Be Evil” is actually “Don’t Be Evil About Entertaining” and that it’s a…it’s a cookbook! (see below from “The Twilight Zone.”)

Ballmer wrote: Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

Translation: If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong Microsoft, shall we not revenge?

(But no tickling!)

Ballmer wrote: I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Translation: In the immortal words of Mr. Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, from his role in “Last Action Hero” as Hamlet:

“To be or not to be. Not to be!” (See video below.)

Ballmer wrote: Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Microsoft Corporation

Translation: Hasta la vista, Jerry! You won’t have Stevie to kick around anymore!