From
The Colbert Report to astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, here's a look at this week's search stars.
The presidency is just my day job
Being the President of the United State is no easy task, but Barack Obama may have just faced his toughest test yet...a seat on
The Colbert Report. This is the Commander-in-Chief’s third time on the show, but it’s still no cakewalk with every topic up for grabs—including Obama’s less than ideal approval ratings and his graying hair. Obama proved himself up for the challenge, though, kicking Colbert off his segment and
making it his own.
Not only does Obama moonlight as a comedian—it turns out he can also code. At a White House event with 30 middle school students, the President kicked off
Hour of Code, a program that encourages young people to develop their computer and software programming skills. With a little help from one of the kids, Obama wrote a single line of JavaScript, “moveForward(100),” to move the tutorial’s character 100 pixels to the right, and in the process becoming the
first U.S. president to write a computer program.
Winners and losers
Competition on
The Voice is heating up; the three finalists were revealed this week. But there’s a twist in the show’s seventh season: to spice things up, its creators introduced a new wildcard spot, bringing the total number of potential finalists to four. Now the nine remaining contestants who didn’t make it to the top three will duke it out for that fourth spot and a shot at singing glory.
While
The Voice contestants still have a chance to take home the grand prize, other stars were left out in the cold this week when the
Golden Globe nominations included several snubs. Names left off the selection sheet were Angelina Jolie and her upcoming film
Unbroken, Christopher Nolan and his much-hyped
Interstellar, and Bradley Cooper, who
gained 40 pounds to portray Chris Kyle in the biopic film
American Sniper. Oh well—there's still the Oscars. Meanwhile, movies
Birdman and
Boyhood snapped up seven and five nominations, respectively—and the TV category is staying interesting with nods for several Netflix original series, Amazon’s first appearance with
Transparent, and two surprise nominations for the CW’s quirky
Jane the Virgin.
The sky above
This week, searchers spent a good chunk of their time looking up. The
weather was top of mind as the Pineapple Express—no, not the film—hit the San Francisco Bay Area, causing flooding and power outages. The phenomenon gets its name from its origins in the waters near Hawaii, a.k.a. the Pineapple State, where it develops before heading towards the U.S Pacific Coast.
Even for those of us trapped indoors, searchers got a chance to look at the stars...on our homepage at least. Searchers looked for more information about astronomer
Annie Jump Cannon after a Google doodle marked her 151st birthday. Cannon—who was deaf for most of her adult life, and often overshadowed by her colleague Edward C. Pickering—was instrumental in the development of the Harvard Classification system, which categorizes stars by their temperature (whether or not they were nominated for a Golden Globe).
Tip of the week
Need to find something in the apps on your Android phone? Now you can ask your Google app for help—even if it’s in another app. Just say “Ok Google” and then “search YouTube for holiday decorating ideas” or “search Tumblr for Taylor Swift” and jump straight to those results within the other app (if you have it installed).
And come back next week for Google's Year in Search—a review of the people, moments, and events that captured the world's attention.
Posted by Jenise Araujo, Communications Associate, who searched for [comedian-in-chief] and [team adam].