BARACK OBAMA spoke to Google yesterday, becoming the first Presidential candidate to actually answer a standard Google interview question with any degree of competency.

There to reveal his plan to appoint a 'Chief Technology Officer' for the United States, should he win the 2008 election, Obama chatted with Erick Schmidt and also took viewer questions from YouTube.

Engineers speaking after the event are quoted as suggesting "There's something about him that's Google-like."

Indeed, the Illinois senator invoked the spirit of Google by comparing himself to the company's founders, Sergei and Larry. When questioned about his supposed lack of experience in politics, Obama quipped that the Google founders didn't have much experience of founding a Fortune 100 company.

"What we share is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up," he added. Obama talked about his plans for implementing the "Google for Government ", a massive database of searchable legislation and political interests. He also pledged support for net neutrality saying that "The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history. We have to keep it that way."

Quite how that tallies up with Google's censorship in China we're not sure, but perhaps that's a work in progress.

You can find more detail on Obama's visit, as well as a YouTube video of his speech, over on Google's Public Policy blog.