Caldwell Tanner didn’t use HBO’s Join the Realm website to create these unique House Sigils. Instead, he came up with his own designs for what popular websites might hang from their proverbial castle walls if they lived in the world of Game of Thrones. And we decided to join in on the fun. Look at the House Sigils and mottos from Twitter, Wikipedia, The Mary Sue, and more!

Photos from the cover of the new Total Film are making the rounds today. It’s our first official look of Lois and Superman together (besides the trailer). (via Collider) 

“When we started Google 15 years ago,” Brin says, “my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn’t have to search query at all.” But for now, we get information by disconnecting from other people, looking down into our smartphone. Brin asks: “Is this the way you’re meant to interact with other people?” Is the future of connection just people walking around hunched up, looking down, rubbing a featureless piece of glass? In an intimate moment, he says, “It’s kind of emasculating. Is this what you’re meant to do with your body?” – Taken from the TED Blog post quoting Google’s Sergey Brin on why Google Glass is totes better than a smartphone.

Either that word does not mean what Brin thinks it means or he has a really bizarre outlook on technology. Dear Brin, if you truly believe your masculinity is threatened by swiping a cell phone screen, we have a few GIFs we think you should see. 

Google street view has caught some interesting things in the past but perhaps none so useful as this. A woman from Russia discovered her fiancé had been cheating on her after looking up an address on an online map and finding his image with another woman.

Google released its statistics on the most trending searches of the past year, naturally, separated into a few different categories. (You know, because without categories the most popular search was probably something like “porn” or “my IP address” or “google.”) Categories like Athletes, Events, Performing Artists, Airlines (oddly enough), and, of course, Feature Films.

And right at the top of the feature film list? The Hunger Games.

Google uses its Global Impact Awards to award grants to small institutions for whom a mere $1.2 million (“mere” when you compare it to the full extent of Google’s wallet) is a huge impact, and places that are also unafraid to “fail fast or challenge the status quo, and have what [they'd] like to call ‘a healthy disregard for the impossible.” So it both makes sense and is pretty cool that Google would choose to give $1.2 million to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and access to their engineers in order to craft experimental software that can analyze gender representation from raw television footage.

I’ve long been a fan of Dustin Nguyen’s Lil’ Gotham characters. Well, after five years of trying to convince DC an out-of-continuity title like this could sell, it’s being released as a digital first comic tomorrow!! Nguyen will be drawing as well as co-writing with Derek Fridolfs. (via DC Source blog)  

This happened yesterday when I was trying to figure out the name of Mysterio. Further research indicates the particular search phenomenon was caused by the credits sequence of The Amazing Spider-Man. Further research did not actually commence until I’d stopped cry/laughing.

Previously in Hats

It’s been two years now since Google unveiled Instant Search, so long, in fact, that I couldn’t remember what it was called anymore. Lets have a refresher: two years ago Google changed the way they display search results from waiting for you to press enter before showing a static page, to displaying a constantly refreshing page of guesses based on the characters you’d typed in so far. The problem with this that many people immediately raised was that nobody was going to want to search for words like “sextillion,” “pork,” or “book,” seeing as how those words share initial letters with “sex,” “porn,” and “boobs.”

No worries, Google had a plan for that: certain words would not call in the instant search function, and instead would require folks to press enter to see anything other than a blank page. These words would offer no autocorrects, no suggested searches, and feature no results. Which seemed reasonable until Instant Search was rolled out, revealing that included on that list of words was “lesbian,” and “bisexual,” but not, for example, “ex-gay.”

It’s taken two years, but BiNet says they’ve managed to get Google to rescind its policy on “bisexual” as a term that does not work with Instant Search.

For even the most casual of internet-dwellers, Google is the king of the internet. Or, perhaps more accurately, the sherpa that helps us navigate its treacherous waters. It gives us directions, answers our crucial questions (“is my cat gay?”), and points us towards the how-tos we most desperately need. So what does the behemoth company do when it most needs its own how-to? Well, it pretty much googles it. And this time it’s in need of advice on how to incorporate more women into the company.