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Travelers now have yet another option for finding the best flights and fares: Google Flight Search . I already think there are too many sites, including Fly.com, Kayak.com, CheapoAir.com, and of course the biggees, Orbitz and Expedia. Not to mention all of the airlines, including Southwest, which doesn't appear on any of those aggregate sites. (Google at least acknowledges Southwest and provides a link to the airline's site.) That hasn't stopped Google from entering the fray.

Yahoo has added another major property to its portfolio, Kanye West went dark and political for his SNL gig, and France is buying military equipment. Welcome to your post-weekend trends report for May 20, 2013. With the exception of television show reactions, most Internet attention this morning centers around Friday news. That includes France's Friday announcement that it is buying drones and Yahoo's announcement that it is buying Tumblr. Apparently only one of those decisions was unpopular enough to warrant NYT reaction coverage . As for weekend content: Kanye West gave what one Twitter user described as "the most terrifying PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen" on SNL Saturday.

What do Janet Jackson, Hurricane Katrina and the Xbox 360 have in common? In 2005, they were among the top news searches on Google, says the company's year-end zeitgeist report. (Ms. Jackson, by the way, was No. 1, doubtless because of her "wardrobe malfunction.") If officers at the world's top search engine wanted to reveal more than that from the company's vast storehouse of retained data, they could go so far as to detail the content of almost half of all Internet searches - down to specific Web sites visited by particular computers.

An Ellicott City seventh-grader has a shot at having her artwork grace Google's homepage. Lauren Shen, who attends Burleigh Manor Middle School, found out this week that her drawing will represent Maryland in the sixth annual Doodle 4 Google contest . More than 130,000 students from across the country in kindergarten through 12th grade entered. The theme was “My Best Day Ever...” “My doodle expresses the theme because the day I arrived in Taiwan was my best day ever,” Lauren told Google.

I read Tuesday's rant from that un-American, left-wing socialist Marta Mossburg, criticizing the free market and capitalism, and I am outraged ( "Turns out Google's free e-mail is worth every penny," Nov. 23). How dare "comrade Mossburg" criticize Google for providing a free e-mail service! Doesn't she know Google is the biggest Internet company in the world? The free market has spoken, and Google is clearly divinely sent by Jesus and Ronald Reagan to deliver us from the evils of the socialist Democrats and their godless, secret Muslim leader Barack Hussein Obama.

People have wristbands to declare their affiliation and support of different groups or causes -- think "Livestrong", the yellow wristband campaign by cyclist Lance Armstrong that raises cancer awareness. But if you wear a new wristband designed by Baltimore's MissionTix, what affiliation are you declaring? I'll tell you: Your right to par-tay in da' club. The new wristband is a wearable and re-usable "ticket" for concerts that you want to attend. Users can just buy new tickets and their wristband gets "re-charged.

Google postponed Tuesday the launch of its mobile phone in China, adding to the potential commercial fallout of its dispute with Beijing over Internet censorship and e-mail hacking. One person briefed on Google's decision said it was linked to the company's threat that it will shut its Chinese-based search engine if restrictions aren't eased.

BEIJING - Google Inc.'s business ties in China unraveled a little more Wednesday amid a widening backlash to the U.S. Internet company's decision to move its Chinese search engine offshore in a challenge to the country's online censorship laws. While the stand is winning Google praise in the U.S. and other countries, it's threatening to turn the company into a pariah in China. A high-profile Communist Party newspaper skewered Google in a front-page article. And more of its partners and advertising customers in the country appeared to be distancing themselves from the company.

TOPEKA, Kan. - Topeka's mayor says the city shall temporarily be referred to as "Google, Kansas - the capital city of fiber optics," in an effort to persuade the Internet giant to test an ultra-fast connection in the state capital. Mayor Bill Bunten issued the proclamation Monday after no city council members objected to the monthlong change. Bunten says the proclamation is mainly for fun, but that he hopes it will set Topeka apart from other cities vying for Google's fiber-optics experiment, including Baltimore, Grand Rapids, Mich.

B altimore might not be willing to follow the lead of Topeka, Kan., and rename itself Google for a month to catch the attention of the search engine giant, but there are plenty of reasons why Charm City would be the ideal place for the company's ultra-high-speed Internet pilot project. Baltimore has an active, engaged tech community pushing hard for the project, but it is at a stage in its development that the attraction of super-speed Internet access could really make a difference.

Someday, Burleigh Manor seventh-grader Lauren Shen might go to Google and see what the Internet search engine is displaying to millions of users throughout the country: her artwork. Lauren, 12, is the state's winner in a Google-sponsored national contest called Doodle 4 Google, which challenges students in kindergarten through 12th grade to create their own version of Google's ever-changing home page logo. The altered versions of the logo are known as "doodles. " Google launched the contest in 2008 and also holds it in other countries.

Stars are shooting, drinking, driving and chomping, and the government is watching. Welcome to your post-weekend trends report for April 22, 2013.  You have to love Congress. America's favorite band of geriatric jokers decided it would be hi-LAR-ious to use a week full of manhunts and explosions as a backdrop for jamming through the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which many civil libertarians view as the most Orwellian surveillance-state bill since the Patriot Act. The bill, which moves from the House to the Senate this week, is co-sponsored by Maryland's own Dutch Ruppersberger.

Today's Google Doodle marks the birthday of Douglas Adams, author of the hilarious "Hitchhiker" sci-fi book series. Adams himself wrote five novels in the trilogy(?!) about the travels of earthling Arthur Dent, alien Ford Prefect and others, beginning with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. " It immediately jumped onto my Top 10 list (which, of course, has about 15 entries). Some years after Adams died in 2001 at the infinitely-too-young age of 49, his widow gave the OK for a sixth book.

Claiming to help farmers, chicken-seller Perdue instead plans to pollute farmers, their families, farms, air, land, water, and food across Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley with toxic emissions from a proposed taxpayer-subsidized industrial soybean crushing factory. Lancaster's local newspapers report the factory would emit such a large quantity of the air pollutant hexane that the company would have to pay for the reduction of smog-producing gases elsewhere. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has awarded $8.75 million from taxpayers to Perdue for designing this factory to dump hexane, a hazardous neurotoxin, into the air of food-growing and food-buying taxpayers across south-central Pennsylvania for decades known as the Garden Spot of America.

Today's Google Doodle honors Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the German brothers who sought out folk tales and published them in collections that included many of our most popular "fairy tales. " You won't find many fairies in the stories -- but plenty of big, bad wolves and evil step-sisters . The brothers, who were trained as lawyers, published hundreds of folk tales in Kinder- und Hausmärchen ( Children's and Household Tales ) and Deutsche Sagen , a collection of German legends, in the early 19th Century, according to a biography compiled by the University of Pittsburgh.

Christmas may actually be 11 days away but nerds are getting their gifts early today. Last night, Google released their popular (and relatively danger-free) Google Maps app on the Apple App Store. The wonky and much ridiculed Apple version is still the default but having a built-in Google Maps will have its advantages -- it's already the top downloaded free app. And later tonight, the first installment of "The Hobbit " will be released in theaters. The reviews are in and while they aren't ecstatic, they are encouraging.

WASHINGTON - The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity. Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cyber experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google - and its users - from future attack.

Vocus , a Beltsville digital marketing company that's growing fast, has a number of useful services for marketers and public relations pros. One of them is PRWeb, a news release service that disseminates business announcements all over the web. The company is pretty serious about growing its business and snagging a piece of the digital marketing services market. I recently wrote a profile of it in The Sun. But the company is now catching a lot of heat for letting a fraudulent press release slip through.

Today we're rolling out some improvements to our map of city homicides. The changes include: -- A larger map. Screens have changed size since we last updated the interface -- A new map color scheme that allows users to more easily locate homicides -- Addition of table-style listings, including the option of seeing the last hundred homicides -- Implementation of Google's street view feature All existing features remain on the...