Wahey! Google showing more Mac love is always a good good thing. I often wondered why Google didn’t put more effort into Mac applications, considering how close Google and Apple work together. Well today I can finally quit wondering and bask in the warm light of Google Desktop for Mac OS X! Still in beta, Google Desktop for the Mac gives you the power of Google.com on your desktop, allowing you to search your local files, web history and even your Gmail email while offline. They are even nudging in on Quicksilver’s territory, allowing you to use the Quick Search feature to launch applications and files. Helloooooo!

Read more: Google Desktop for Mac | Google Desktop for Mac (Thanks Wolfgang)

Being bitter rivals doesn’t mean that the two internet search and advertising giants can’t get along. Imagine a world where Google and Yahoo would collaborate on standards, designs, technology….it would be too good to be true. Google Watch’s Steven Bryant does just that by creating a mock re-design of Google’s well accepted start page, pretending that Google would portalize along the lines of Yahoo’s design standards. Attention Google, attention Yahoo, this is brilliant and I have to admit, this is the start page I’d want to have.

Read more: What if Google made a Yahoolike start page

What what now? According to an ex-Marine intelligence officer and clandestine services case office for the CIA, Google’s conception wouldn’t have been possible without the help of CIA seed money. That’s the first I’ve heard of this, but believe me, I’d love to hear more about it! Though the source goes on to say Google’s relationship with the CIA is “small but significant” and that Google has had to turn down “everything” the CIA has asked them to do since, which is good to know! A parting quote which I enjoyed quite a bit:

We regularly highlight Google’s damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.

Read more: CIA seed money helped found Google

Guess we won’t get an answer to that one! Har har har har har har. Google yesterday announced that their first Labs project, Answers, is being axed. Google will stop accepting new questions by the end of this week, with answers being accepted until the end of the year. An interesting note is that over the past 4 years, the participating users numbers less than 1000, a shockingly low amount for a Google product.

Read more: Google announces Answers shutdown | Google Answers

Those daring bloggers over at underGoogle has put up an amazingly funny little Google Maps mash-up, featuring an extremely extremely long white board documenting Google’s plan for world domination as dictated to us via a free-for-all board hidden deep within a Google lair somewhere. Warning, this quite a time waster for the hardcore nerds, so, look at it off of company time (har har).

See more: Google master plan revealed!

Google today announced that their Gmail mobile client has gone live! The Gmail mobile client is designed to be as powerful as the web client, allowing users to search their email, easily navigate and compose mail with the minimal of clicks and even allows users to click and call contacts stored in your Gmail contacts list. The client is JAVA-based and runs on hundreds of JAVA-enabled mobile devices already.

Read more: Gmail mobile client goes live

I’m stepping into dangerous nerd territory here, one which I think might expose my lack of true nerd abilities, but, here we go anyways. With Google’s recent launch of their nifty code search engine, hackers and coders from around the world are having fun finding all the great little surprises hidden in the source of some of our favorite open source applications. But, now someone has found more, the source to DOS 6.0, also known as the DOS to rule them all. Available for anyone to download and enjoy though I don’t really know what anyone would use it for, other than reliving the olden times before Windows took over the land and Mac was banished to the tower to hatch their plan to eventually rule the desktop computer (it’s coming, just you wait).

Read more: DOS 6.0 source available via Google Code Search (Via Kottke.org)

The bubble got a little more inflated today as the king of video sharing sites was scooped up by Google, the king of everything else, for $1.65 billion dollars in stock. Expect millions to be poured into video sharing sites for the next few months, maybe a year, then watch as one by one these sites begin to fall by the wayside. Mark Cuban is probably selling off all of his Google holdings right now and the blogosphere is about to explode. All of this excitement with our 300th posting here on Bunch of Nerds!

Read more: Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock

Created by Flash games developer Mark Caswell-Daniels, Goggles is a brilliant browser-based flight simulator built using Google Maps images and Flash technology. In the game, users are able to fly a top-down 3d biplane rendering through major cities around the world, such as New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, London and even the Planet Mars, using images captured from Google Mapping services. The developer seems to have gotten a little flack from people concerned about the games’ ability to allow ‘terrorists’ to crash the plane into buildings, but, common sense hopefully prevails and people see it for what it is, a fun an innovative use of web technology to create a neat little casual flight sim.

Read more: Goggles – Google Maps flight-sim

The Arnold Information Technology group have created an ever-growing list of Google’s patent approvals and applications, sorted by date and featuring a short summary of each, giving users a little more insight into the plans of the search-engine behemoth. While most of the Google’s patents revolve around their lifeblood ad delivery market, there are a few patents which cover some of their search engine, gmail spam filtering technology and geo-location systems, which might interest some of the more diehard Google tech-watchers.

Read more: List of Google patents