The White House has given its stamp of approval to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Moderator, which it will use to pick questions for President Barack Obama’s online town-hall meeting Thursday. The service, launched in September, lets users submit questions and then vote on which ones they want answered. Google notes on its Official Google Blog that the service can “now support tens of thousands of people at once.”

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And indeed, as of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, 17,672 questions had been submitted and 548,029 votes had been cast on a White House site. The most-popular category of question? Jobs. The most popular question? From James of Bloomington, Ind.: “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month, what is the government doing to make higher education more affordable for lower- and middle-class families?”