Google is hosting an open, public meetup tonight at the Red Door in Fremont, and buying the first round.

Comments and questions will be fielded by company representatives, including two notable visitors from the Mountain View HQ: Maile Ohye, developer programs tech lead, and Daphne Keller, managing product counsel and author of some of the company's product privacy policies.

The event follows a media roundtable the company hosted this morning at its Fremont offices, part of a national tour the company's public affairs group is organizing to introduce the company and tell its current story to journalists and media-site Web crews.

My favorite line from this morning came when Keller introduced online tools for asking Google to remove copyrighted material protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. She called it "the East Coast way to tell a search engine what to do."

A spokesman organizing the media tour insisted the events weren't intended to counter the attention that Microsoft's Bing is receiving, saying they were organized before Bing surfaced.

The outreach seems designed more to build connections and humanize Google as the company enters choppier legal and policy waters, such as growing concerns about the company's near monopoly on search advertising.

More details of tonight's open house, which is expected to be attended largely by Web pofessionals, are at this Meetup.com page.