MediaPost's Search Insider Summit closed Saturday with a look at how Ball State University students might re-engineer Google if given the opportunity. Jen Milks and Michelle Prieb, project managers at Ball State University, shared the findings. I'll share them with you this week. The basics include turning search into a personal assistant, recommendations, and personalization. It also means tweaking the query page. They want a relationship with the search engine by combining social and search.

Growing Tea Party organizers tried to make it official: Having a Fox News anchor do some of its heavy lifting-- that is, raising money. But Fox News executives got wind of the operation and put the kibosh on Sean Hannity, cancelling a taping of his show at a Cincinnati-based Tea Party event Thursday – this, according to the Los Angeles times. Event organizers were said to be using tickets to fund future events, with Hannity's Web site also offering up links to purchase tickets. Hannity went back to his New York studio for his Thursday show -- looking …

WSJ's BoomTown blogger Kara Swisher hears Yahoo is making a renewed push for hot social location service Foursquare, with M&A head Andrew Siegel back in New York today meeting with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley. The company which has already turned down several $100 million + offers so far but Yahoo apparently isn't giving up hope. A Silicon Valley powerhouse wooing a New York-based startup, that's a switch.

Demand Media, a startup that mines online search engine data to generate thousands of videos and web stories a day -- what some call a “content farmâ€� -- has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO, The Financial Times reports. The company could file for an IPO as early as August, the paper says, citing “people familiar with the plans.â€� Founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt, Demand has created a system through which writers and programmers are assigned stories or projects based on a software algorithm, which determines the interest of web visitors and calculates potential revenues from …

Get back to work! A full 6.8% of all the URLs accessed by businesses goes to Facebook, and 10% of Internet bandwidth goes to YouTube, according to a new report from Network Box. “The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work,â€� Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, tells SC Magazine UK. “There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used …

Google’s latest pet project is a Cloud Print service, which will enable “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.â€� Still in the early days of development, Google made the code and documentation public as part its Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Mashable reports. “The ideal experience is for your printer to have native support for connecting to cloud print services,â€� the documentation explains. “Under this model, the printer has no need for a PC connection of any kind or for a print driver … The printer is simply registered with one or …

Move over mobile phones. Connected devices like the iPod, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, and iPad, accounted for 21% of U.S. impressions on mobile ad network Millennial Media in March. Smartphones generated 45%, and feature phones, 34%. In its first week, iPad impressions alone increased 713% in the Apple tablet’s first week in release. Apple devices overall generated the largest share of impressions on the network, at 40%, according to Millennial’s latest metrics report. Looking at mobile operating systems, Google’s Android platform continued to gain ground, with ad requests increasing 72%. BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion saw ad requests …

Continuing to press its argument that Google knew of privacy on YouTube, Viacom today released additional court documents showing that Google executives were aware of infringement on the video-sharing site before purchasing the company. Viacom says that these documents, like ones released late last month, support its case that Google should be held liable for infringement on the site. “Taken together, these exhibits make clear one of our core claims in the case: that Google made a deliberate, calculated business decision not only to profit from copyright infringement, but also to use the threat of copyright infringement to …

Nielsen has struck a deal with Bazaarvoice to feed its consumer ratings and reviews into the research firm’s BuzzMetrics dashboard to provide marketers a better understanding of consumers’ online behavior. The move essentially merges the brand conversations Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics service tracks across social networks, blogs, message boards and other sites, with the customer feedback Bazaarvoice collects from company product pages. What’s the benefit of bringing the two consumer data pools together? Because marketers should stop looking at social media as a series of isolated channels, according to Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall. “If you have ratings and reviews on …

The technologist who first reported that Comcast was degrading peer-to-peer traffic is now asking subscribers to opt out of a class-action settlement stemming from the throttling. The settlement involves Comcast giving rebates of up to $16 to affected subscribers. “If that tiny amount of money is compensation, then there is no penalty to Comcast for interfering with its customers, for failing to disclose it, for repeatedly lying about it, and for taking so long to stop it,â€� says software tester Robb Topolski. “The settlement was reached under the assumption that the FCC would still oversee Comcast,â€� …