Jessica Guynn has an excellent interview with Google's Marissa Mayer today about Google's first ten years (today is arguably Google's tenth birthday). Good stuff in there - Marissa talks about Google's accomplishments in search and advertising, and looks forward to a future where cloud computing becomes pervasive. Marissa also says she hopes to still be at the company in another ten years. But one thing caught my eye. Marissa says search is "90 to 95%" solved:

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books. How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses.

I haven't had a lot of time to jump into the fracas this weekend emerging about TechCrunch50 because the team has been busy organizing the conference, working with the Expert Panelists on scheduling issues and spending hours and hours working with the 52 startups that will be launching at the event to make sure their demos properly reflect what they've worked so hard to create. But I do have a few things to say. First, thanks to Chris O'Brien at the San Jose Mercury News who wrote such a great article on TechCrunch and the conference. What a wonderful, positive way to kick things off as we go into the craziness on Monday. He really gets what we're trying to accomplish and how honored we are that these startups have chosen to launch at our event.

Giving away products can be a logistical pain. For instance, when we give away a T-shirt or laptop, we have to go through hundreds of comments, contact the person, and do a lot of manual processing. A new Y Combinator startup called ContestMachine that just launched makes giving stuff away as easy as putting a widget on your blog. You create a contest widget by entering all the details of the giveaway: prizes, deadlines, rules. Winners can be randomly chosen by ContestMachine or judged by the blogger. It automates the process of creating giveaways, and opens up contests to any blogger or small business who has a Website. The service is free to try out for up to two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month or $90 a year for more contests.

Gwendolyn DeBard Strong was born on October 4, 2007 and was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1 (SMA1) in April 2008. SMA1 is a terminal genetic disease that results in loss of nerves in the spinal cord and weakness of the muscles connected with those nerves. Her parents are asking that you consider signing a petition asking Congress to fund research into a cure for the disease. The NIH has said that a cure is possibly only a few years away. The petition is here. Please read and sign it, and pass this on to others. The goal is 50,000 signatures. If each of you reading this sign now, we'll get to that number in just a few hours. And if you watch the video, you'll sign.

We're getting reports that Peerflix, the tumultuous company that switched from acting as a DVD-swapping service to an ad network, has been acquired by Brad Greenspan's LiveUniverse for an undisclosed amount (though we're guessing it's pretty low). We've asked LiveUniverse to comment. Peerflix was founded in 2004 as a "peer-to-peer Netflix", helping users to swap DVDs they owned for a dollar. The site abandoned the flat fixed pricing scheme for a demand-based model in 2006, but that didn't work well either: in November 2007 it decided to launch a media network that had nothing to do with its original DVD swapping service. Peerflix finally canned the DVD trading business earlier this year, so Live Universe is acquiring it solely for its ad network.

Every couple has its ups and downs, but most people try to keep their dirty laundry to themselves. But what about those times when you just can't come to an agreement with your significant other? Today sees the launch of SideTaker a site that asks couples to upload both sides of their arguments and let the crowd settle their debates. SideTaker members can vote on which side they agree with, or leave comments to ask for further details or voice their opinions. The site is hilarious. Disputes range from cheating spouses to toilet flushing, oftentimes filled with more detail than anyone would want to know.

Tatango, the ad-supported group SMS service previously known as networkText, spent the last few months in a private beta following a functional and visual overhaul and a round of funding by Bellingham Angel Organization. Now everyone is free to get in on the group texting good times; they’ve opened the doors to the public.

The service is dead simple to use, as it should be. I made the jump from accountless bum to en masse messaging mogul in all of about 2 minutes.

From: "John S." Date: September 5, 2008 11:43:36 AM PDT To: tips@techcrunch.com Subject: Celebrity Dating Network How is it that Techcrunch will do countless stories on every idiotic widget created by countless 19 year olds who manage to get their uncles at some VC to fund it because they can back door money to each other yet you guys won't cover something really interesting? Have you checked out CelebrityDatingNetwork.com? Its the first dating service in the world that allows you to meet and date real celebrities as well as find people who bear a facial resemblance to the love of your life. Start acting like journalists in search of a wider audience...lol. Crossing over into mainstream media will take more than a re-design of your website. You need to stop doing 50 stories a day about Google Chrome and step into the cool tech zone. We gave you a five day head start on CelebrityDatingNetwork.com Prove to us it wasn't a mistake and write a story about it that gets picked up by the mainstream media. John

Researchers at Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece - a hotbed of Facebook research - have created a small Facebook application that causes a DDOS on a certain website. The application masquerades as a "picture of the day" app and shows an image from National Geographic. When someone clicks on it, however, it makes a request to a victim's website, pulling down about 248 gigabytes of fake data a day and essentially shutting down the server.

As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple. At its heart, Veritocracy pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme -- targeted stories and related posts to an original story -- and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you're immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment. The site collects what it deems to be the best perspectives on various subjects from around the Web, groups them together, and lets its users decide which is best through the use of a voting system. As a user votes on different stories, Veritocracy becomes more personalized to that specific user's interests. And as long as that engine works well, Veritocracy claims publishers will be able to find the ideal target audience and readers will find stories that fit their interests."The ultimate objective," says CEO Lee Hoffman, "is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it." Before that can happen, Veritocracy has a long way to go. Right now, the site is in private beta and is slowly working its way towards a wider release later this year. If you want to check out Veritocracy for yourself, Veritocracy sent us 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. To redeem your invite, type "techcrunchlove" into the invite box, sign up, and start using it.

Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it's time we compare each candidate's attention online as we head into the final stretch. According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.

You'd think that with the FCC conducting so many wireless spectrum auctions, that all that spectrum sold off for billions of dollars would be all used up. The sad truth is that many companies who win spectrum at auction end up sitting on it. All of this "fallow" spectrum is a big problem. A Florida startup called Spectrum Bridge today launched a marketplace to address this problem. Companies that own spectrum can use Spectrum Bridge to find buyers and sellers for portions of spectrum they own that they don't need. The marketplace has $250 million worth of spectrum listed, which is not that much considering that companies spent $19 billion on the last official FCC auction. But at least it is a start. The secondary market for spectrum is grossly inefficient today, mostly consisting of side deals between telecom companies.

Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Total print ads in the U.S. were down 16 percent in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. That makes nine consecutive quarters in which "print revenues have declined at an almost continuously accelerating rate," notes Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. He put together the chart at left, which starkly illustrates the newspaper industry's death dive. The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion. At this rate, there won't be an industry left by the end of next year. Of course, revenues have to stabilize at a lower level before that happens. Don't they? Rght now, we're at 1995 revenue levels.