Google has hired Apple senior director of product integrity Simon Prakash from Apple according to VentureBeat. Prakash is most likely working with Sergey Brin on a secret research project.

Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX). This Act would allow the Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement that would prevent online ad networks and payment facilitators from doing business with those websites. Opponents in this bill believe that this is Internet censorship. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang oppose the bill. Their letter will appear as a paid ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmdit offered $33 million to refurbish NASA’s Hangar One. As a result, the three executives would essentially be leasing the space from NASA to park eight of their private jets in there. Page, Brin, and Schmidt made the offer through their H211 airplane operations company this past September. NASA has not accepted the offer as of yet.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin has made a $500,000 grant to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is attempting to raise $28.3 million for its annual budget. The donation was made as part of a foundation created by Sergey and his wife Anne Wojcicki.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has a research and development lab that many employees do not know about called Google X. There are over hundreds of projects including dinner plates, robots that fetch groceries, and smart refrigerators.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has received a patent on their logo doodles. It took about 10 years of lobbying to get the patent. Doodles are the customized version of the Google logo that the company puts on their homepage during the holidays. Above is an example of a doodle that the company used for Thanksgiving. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was credit for inventing the patent, which is entitled “System and Method For Enticing Users To A Web Site.” The first Google Doodle was for St. Patrick’s Day in 2000. [BusinessInsider]

Back in 2000, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to hire Apple CEO Steve Jobs as their company CEO. Around then, Google’s investors said that their company needed some adult supervision through with an experienced CEO. John Doerr arranged interviews between Page and Brin with Andy Grove (Intel) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com). “…they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs,” wrote Wired senior writer Steven Levy. Jobs was too busy running Apple at the time and was gearing up to launch the first iPod. Eventually Doerr convinced the two to hire Novell CEO Eric Schmidt. [CultOfMac]

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced in a filing with the U.S. SEC that seven senior executives are getting a 30% raise for 2011. These seven execs are Patrick Pichette, Nikesh Arora, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eustace. Now alll of their base salaries are $650,000.