In an email today to publishers including the Boston Phoenix, Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on "newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites."

You may have heard of a company called Google. They say they're not evil. And to prove they're not evil, when Google was caught collecting people's private email and data when Google's Big Brother vans swept through neighborhoods collecting photographs and scanning for unsecured wi-fi networks, they promised that they would safely discard all the very private information as soon as they felt like it.

Here's a newsflash: privacy is kind of under attack. Fine, we all sort of had that one figured out. But this week in the Phoenix we're bringing you three stories that attempt to bring that big idea into tighter focus. In "Google: The Ultimate Cockblocker," Boston-bred Hustler contributor Scott Fayner laments his inability to date nice suburban girls without them quickly finding out that he used to be married to a porn star.

Apparently someone over at NPR has been trolling our website for story ideas. First, they took a shot at our film critic Peter Keough for taking a shot at Scott Pilgrim fanboys. For their second Phoenix namedrop in a week, we turn to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, NPR's weekly news quiz show. In a reoccurring segment entitled "Who's Carl This Time?", the show's official scorekeeper Carl Kasell rattles off quotes and one lucky contestant gets to guess what timely news story he's referencing in his quote.

Last week, we touched upon the net neutrality issue to help explain and add context to the buzz around a forthcoming Google-Verizon deal. That "deal," as you may have heard, was announced on Monday.

The first thing to note is that it's not an actual deal.

In recent weeks, top officials from the Federal Communications Commission have held closed-door meetings to negotiate with the country’s biggest communications companies and online service providers on how the Internet should be regulated. In a statement today, the FCC said it had called off those talks, saying the effort "has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet."

We all know how Twitter works, right? It's the real-time web: if you go to search.twitter.com and type in "Nick Jonas," you're going to find out what Nick and his legions are doing RIGHT NOW.

But two weeks ago, Twitter announced that it would soon begin returning "most popular" results -- a huge shift in what we think of the site's primary mission.

Harvard Square to the Phoenix offices via bicycle, according to Google.

I'm a recent-ish convert to the world of bicycle commuting, and as such, I've often wondered if I've been doing it right. Specifically, is there a faster route I could be taking to get into work? Now there's an easy way to find out: Google has added a "bicycle" option to Google Maps, which seems to look for things like bike paths and areas with clearly-indicated bicycle lanes.

Facebook and Google are expanding their services into music sharing, sampling, and downloading, the New York Times reported yesterday.

Google will be announcing their new music offering next Wednesday, but the word on the street is that once a user searches for information on a band, album or song(s), an option to play a 30-second sample, or in some cases the whole song, will appear.

The first of April is an interesting phenomenon. It's as if everyone- including the biggest news outlets, corporations, and entertainers in the world- gets a free ticket to do and say whatever they want, all in the name of comedy. Not that the holiday isn't appreciated, especially at a time when everyone could use a laugh. Here are a few of our favorite pranks from the first half of April Fool's Day, 2009.