There are many missing features in Google Instant. The classic interface suggested searches from the Web History, so you could select previously typed queries.
It seems that this feature will be available again. Google tests a version of Google Instant with Web History suggestions. For some queries, 3 of the 4 suggestions are from the Web History and there's only one general suggestion.
Maybe it would be a better idea to only show one or two personalized suggestions, since they aren't always useful.
Google added some keyboard shortcuts that help you pick a search result without using a mouse. After typing your query and pressing Enter, you'll notice a small arrow next to the top result. You can press Enter to visit the page or press the up/down arrow keys to select a different result. To open a page in a new tab use Ctrl+Enter and to open it in a new window use Shift+Enter.
The shortcuts work even if you want to go to the next page of results.
If there's an ad displayed above search results, Google doesn't ignore it.
Unfortunately, the currently selected result is not preserved after visiting the page and going back to Google. That's an important feature which was available in the Keyboard Shortcuts experiment.
The support for keyboard shortcuts is not limited to web search results. You can use the shortcuts in Image Search, Google Video, Google News, Book Search, Google Groups and Google Blog Search.
As previously promised, Google Nexus One's site has been replaced by a gallery of Android phones. "The Google Phone Gallery features a selection of Android-powered phones currently available. All the phones in the gallery include Google Search, Android Market, and Google Mobile services such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Maps," explains Google.
You can restrict the phones to a carrier or manufacturer, compare them and buy the phones from third-party stores. The list is not comprehensive and the search box is not very useful.
"Here at Google, we're thrilled with the global adoption of Android and with the high quality of devices that are coming to market around the world. Since there are so many great phones, we wanted to make the selection process a little easier for people who are in the market for a new one. Google Phone Gallery [is] a showcase of Android-powered devices that deliver the best Google experience today," says Google's Ben Serridge.
Nexus One was a great reference Android phone better suited for developers and technology enthusiasts. Google's branding didn't help the phone because Google didn't manage explain why the phone was special. Probably not many people cared that the phone was sold unlocked, it was easy to root, had a stock Android interface and it was updated by Google. Hopefully, Google will do a better job at showcasing other devices.
Google's URL Shortener has been used by Google services like FeedBurner, Google News, Blogger to share links on Twitter. Google didn't provide a web interface for the service, but third-party sites managed to fill the void.
Now you can go to goo.gl, paste any web address and get a short URL. Google also shows stats for any short URL generated using the service: append ".info" to the address and you'll see the number of clicks, a list of traffic sources and some aggregate information about visitors. Here's an example: http://goo.gl/l6MS.info.
If you sign in to a Google account, Google will save a list of recently generated URLs. Another advantage is that Google will always generate unique URLs when you are logged in, so that the stats are more useful.
Google's URL shortener still doesn't have an official API and it doesn't offer all the features that are available at bit.ly (most notably, you can't customize URLs), but it works well. "We've had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we've worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust," mentions Google's social blog. Google also added automatic spam detection and doubled the service's speed.
If you use Google Chrome, install goo.gl URL Shortener, an unofficial extension that generates short URLs and copies them to the clipboard. For Firefox, there's a similar extension called goo.gl lite.
To use Street View on Google Maps for your supported phone, select a place on the map and then choose the Street View option if available. With an Android-powered phone, try hopping across each continent with the new Street View smart navigation.
Last December, we wrote about our immersive Google Earth environment, Liquid Galaxy: eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view.
Liquid Galaxy at TED 2010
Since then, we’ve taken it to a lot of conferences, built Liquid Galaxies in Google offices all over the world and even put one in the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif. We love watching people try it for the first time. Almost everybody wants to see their own house first; but then they start to explore, and we can never guess where they’ll choose to go next.
But we just couldn’t bring it to enough people—we could only go to so many conferences, and only friends and family of Googlers could try out the Liquid Galaxies in our offices.
So we decided to put the features that make Liquid Galaxy possible into the latest release of Google Earth, and open-source all the supporting work, from our Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of our custom frames.
Not everyone will have the know-how to network computers together and get view synchronization working, but we tried to make it as easy as possible. If you think you’re up to the challenge, check out our Quick Start page. You can also contact our supplier End Point if you’d rather buy than build (or just need some professional assistance). Here’s a video they made that shows Liquid Galaxy in action:
Liquid Galaxies don’t have to be made from eight big LCD screens; the view sync features scale just fine from two to dozens of screens. And they can run more than just Google Earth; we’ve had success playing video in sync in our Liquid Galaxies, and even modified a Free Software video game for after-hours fun. We’ve daydreamed about making panoramic movies, head tracking or even real-time video from distant panoramic cameras. Read more on the Liquid Galaxy page at earth.google.com, and show off your creations in the liquid-galaxy discussion group. We’re excited to see what you come up with!
Posted by Jason Holt, Software Engineer, Liquid Galaxy 20% Team
Update 12:01PM: To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island—such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.
We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.
Three years later, we’re happy to announce that you can now explore Street View imagery on all seven continents, with the addition today of Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica. You can now see images from around the world spanning from the beaches of Brazil, to the moors of Ireland, to the icy terrain in Antarctica.
We often consider Street View to be the last zoom layer on the map, and a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person—whether you’re checking out a coffee shop across town or planning a vacation across the globe. We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas.
For example, as summer winds down here in Mountain View, Calif., the famous beaches of Copacabana, Brazil are an enticing virtual travel destination.
The Ring of Kerry in Ireland, with its picturesque rolling landscape, is another favorite new place in Street View.
Speaking of travel, my wife BethEllyn and I embarked on the Minerva for an expedition to Antarctica in late January. We enjoyed stunning vistas, and I found that any minute not spent on deck was a spectacular view missed. Fortunately, we’d planned to take some Street View photos, and are now able to share with you the incredible visuals from Half Moon Island, Antarctica.
Here is a group of Chinstrap penguins we saw on the island.
And this is one of my favorite views. You can see part of the crescent shape that gives the island its name.
I’m very proud of the worldwide Street View team and thrilled that everyone can now see places from all seven continents, including the amazing landscapes and natural beauty I saw in Antarctica, through the street-level images in Google Maps and Google Earth. To see more highlights from Street View around the world, visit the Street View gallery and start exploring!
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps
Google Translate is the first important machine translation service that supports Latin. Google says that thousands of books that are available in Google Book Search include Latin passages and the machine translation service has been trained using texts that are already translated.
The results aren't great and it will be difficult to improve them, but it's still an interesting experiment. Here's an example of translation:
"Translating by machine from Latin is difficult and our grasp of grammar not without error. The Latin is unmatched because most of them Latin books have already been written and only a few of the new shall be hereafter. Many have been translated into other languages and these translations we use to train our translation system. Since this system translates books well similar to those from whom he learned, our ability to translate famous books (such as The Gallic War Caesar 's) is already good."
Picasa Web Albums is the central repository for all the photos uploaded to Google's services. If you upload photos to Blogger, Google Buzz, Orkut or upload a background image for Google's homepage, your photos are stored in Picasa Web Albums.
Unfortunately, Google creates many albums that clutter the interface. For example, Google Buzz creates a new album every time you upload one or more photos. Picasa Web addressed this issue by grouping all the Buzz albums in a special gallery called "Photos from posts".
Google Buzz is not the only service that adds unnecessary albums: Blogger creates albums to store the photos uploaded to your blogs. Picasa's albums aren't a good way to organize photos because they have limitations (the maximum number of albums has been recently increased to 10,000), you can't store the same photo in multiple albums and individual photos don't have privacy controls. Until Picasa Web Albums drops "Picasa" and "albums" from its name and becomes Google Photos, the service will be an online extension of a desktop software and will inherit Picasa's flaws and limitations.
Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Americani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student.
Convertere instrumentis computatoriis ex Latina difficile est et intellegamus grammatica nostra non sine culpa esse. Autem Latina singularis est quia plurimi libri lingua Latina iampridem scripti erant et pauci novi posthac erunt. Multi in alias linguas conversi sunt et his conversis utamur ut nostra instrumenta convertendi edoceamus. Cum hoc instrumentum facile convertat libros similes his ex quibus edidicit, nostra virtus convertendi libros celebratos (ut Commentarios de Bello Gallico Caesaris) iam bona est.
Proximo tempore locum Latinum invenies vel auxilio tibi opus eris cum litteris Latinis, conare hunc.
As a young kid, I drew a lot of dinosaurs. My dad would bring home reams of dot matrix printer paper from work, which I'd take, fold into stapled booklets, and then fill with dinosaurs doing what dinosaurs did—eating, leaping about, facing off in epic combat on top of spewing volcanoes. What I didn't know was that dinosaurs were also quite handy. A brontosaurus tail made an excellent water slide, you could walk up a row of plates on a stegosaurus' back like a flight of stairs and the triceratops’ horns were actually cutting-edge can openers. For these paleontological insights into Stone Aged innovation, I have the Flintstones to thank.
The Flintstones may have lived in the prehistoric town of Bedrock, but their technology was on par with much of what we use today. Everyone drove human-powered vehicles (zero emissions!), composted scraps in a dinosaur under the kitchen sink, and even wore solar powered watches—that is, if you count sundials. In short, Bedrock was the modern city of the past... and I wanted to live in it! Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out, but to be able to pay tribute to one of my favorite childhood TV shows in the form of a Google doodle is easily the next best thing.
On the 50th anniversary of its first airing, we gladly salute “The Flintstones” for inspiring our imaginations and encouraging us to think outside of the box, even if it means taking a look back now and then. I hope you’ll join the rest of us here at Google in a little nostalgia to mark this fun occasion!
Oh, and if you know any saber-toothed tigers looking for an internship as a hole puncher, give me a buzz.
Here at Google, we’re thrilled with the global adoption of Android and with the high quality of devices that are coming to market around the world. Since there are so many great phones, we wanted to make the selection process a little easier for people who are in the market for a new one. Today we’re rolling out the Google Phone Gallery -- a showcase of Android-powered devices that deliver the best Google experience today. Check it out at http://www.google.com/phone.
All the phones in the gallery include Android Market, Google Search, and other Google Mobile services such as Gmail, Maps, and YouTube. There are tools that make it easy to compare phones side by side: you can filter phones by country, manufacturer, and carrier; view and compare technical specifications and features; and find where each phone is available for sale.
We’ll continue adding phones and countries over time, both to round out the gallery and as new phones come to market.
Gmail now offers users the ability to switch between conversation view and the traditional message-based unthreaded view. When a user switches to unthreaded view, messages are no longer grouped together into a conversation, and each message is shown as a separate entry in the inbox. The inbox is still sorted in reverse chronological order.
Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government
Languages included: All languages supported by Gmail
How to access what's new: This feature is only available to domains whose administrator has enabled the ‘enable pre-release features’ checkbox in the Control Panel.
In Gmail ‘Settings’, go to the new ‘Conversation View’ section, select to have that view on or off and click ‘Save changes’.
Note: The mobile web-based view of Gmail will still be threaded, as will the Gmail Mobile Client app. However, if you are using a Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, or Android device, you can access Gmail unthreaded in the native mail clients of those devices using Google’s sync tools.
Imagine driving to work and your Check Engine light comes on. After pulling over and calling a tow truck, you realize you’ll need another car to get to work while yours is getting repaired. You pull out your phone and search for “car rental,” hoping that you can find one nearby. From a Google search ad result you discover there’s an Enterprise Rent-A-Car location just half-a-mile away! You click on the phone number listed in the ad and are instantly connected with the car rental service. Soon, an Enterprise representative is on his way to pick you up.
Visit the Google Mobile Ads blog to read more about how a new hyperlocal ad feature provides distance information to help you know a business is nearby and helps businesses better connect with mobile users on the go.
Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Google Mobile Ads Product Manager
Our aim with Google Instant is to make search faster and easier, and this week we’re rolling out two enhancements to take that a step further. First, we’ve introduced keyboard navigation to help you explore your Instant search results using just your keyboard, with no need for a mouse or touchpad. We’re also making Instant available within many of the search features in the left panel of the results page including Videos, News, Books, Blogs, Updates and Discussions.
Check out our quick video to learn how to use these new features:
Google Instant is already available in domains for seven countries and today we’re excited to announce that it’s rolling out in the domains for 12 new countries, for signed-in users in Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine. We’ll keep improving your search experience and make Instant available in more places internationally in the weeks ahead.
In most email clients threading is just an optional feature that can be easily disabled. Gmail's web interface has been inspired by Google Groups, so it's obvious that threading was an important feature.
Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer that developed Gmail, says that Google tries to increase the adoption of Google Apps by making Gmail more enterprise-friendly.
It's my opinion that when designing products, especially new products, it's better to have some people love it than have everyone tolerate it. This generally means aiming for simplicity and philosophical consistency. If you're aiming for "everyone tolerates it", then the approach switches more towards creating a "giant pile of features". I suspect that this change is driven by their desire for greater enterprise adoption (Google apps), where the "more features and checkboxes" approach very often wins out, even if it's ultimately a worse product.
Google says that the conversation view is not for everyone. "Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years."
Conversation view can be disabled from the settings page by checking "conversation view off" in the General tab. This option may not be available right away, but Google promises that it "will be rolling out over the next few days". Google Apps users will only see this option if the administrator has enabled "pre-release features".
A new revision history interface is now available in Google documents that makes it even easier to see document revisions when collaborating.
Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Team, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government
Languages included: All languages supported by Google Docs
How to access what's new: - To see the new interface, go to ‘File’, then ‘See revision history’ when editing a document. - Click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. - Changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted. - Time stamps are also improved in the new interface. - The interface also batches revisions into groups of changes to make it easier to understand how a document has changed over time. To see a finer-grained list of revisions, click ‘Show more detailed revisions'.
Google has recently demoed a new feature that will make Google Translate a lot more useful: conversation mode. Instead of typing the text you want to translate, you can just speak it and Google will convert speech into text, translate the text and use text-to-speech to output the result. You can already do that if you install the Google Translate app from the Android Market. Conversation mode lets you quickly switch between two languages, so that two people can have a conversation even if they speak different languages.
"Google showed off a new application that translates conversations on Android mobiles at a recent conference in Germany. Google employees held a conversation over two Android mobiles with one person speaking German and the other English. The application worked its magic after each persons statement and then referred the translated message back to the other person," reported Simon Thomas.
Unfortunately, the results aren't always great. Google Translate's conversation mode will be released in a few months.
When Google released the new version of Google Docs, one of the missing features was comparing revisions. The latest update to Google Docs brings this feature back, but only for consecutive revisions.
Google Docs adds a sidebar that lists the most recent revisions and lets you preview them. "Click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. Changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted," explains Google.
Google groups the changes from a short period of time into a single revision, but you can click on "Show more detailed revisions" to see all the changes.
You can also use the up/down keys to scan through revisions and press Escape to go back to the editor.
This afternoon, we gave a keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York, entitled “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.”
As you know by now, we’re investing significantly to make display advertising better for users, advertisers and publishers. Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent.
Today, we explained why we think display advertising is about to go through the biggest and most important revolution in its history. We made seven predictions about where display advertising will be in 2015:
50 percent of ad campaigns will include video ads bought on a cost-per-view basis (that means that the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches). That’s up from very little today.
Today, advertisers are starting to deliver ads that are tailored to particular audiences. Many are using real-time bidding technology, so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. In 2015, 50 percent of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology.
With smartphone growth skyrocketing, mobile is going be the number one screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands.
Today, the “click” is the most important way that advertisers measure their display ad campaigns, but it’s not always the best measure—especially if an ad campaign is designed to boost things like brand awareness or recall. With new measurement technologies emerging, in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click.
Just like most news articles on the web today can be commented on, shared, discussed, subscribed to and recommended, in 2015, 75 percent of ads on the web will be “social” in nature—across dozens of formats, sites and social communities.
Rich media formats work. They enable great creativity and interaction between users and advertisers, but today they only represent about 6 percent of total display ad impressions. That will increase to 50 percent, for brand-building ad campaigns.
All the investments that are making display advertising smarter and sexier will help publishers increase their revenues. Display advertising is going to grow to a $50 billion industry in five years.
We also wanted to visualize the face of the display advertising revolution, so we demonstrated four exciting new technologies:
We demonstrated some new video ad formats we’ve been testing on YouTube that we’re calling “TrueView.” These will roll out later this year. These ad formats give people the option to skip an ad if they don’t want to watch, or to choose from multiple ads the one they want to watch. Importantly, advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch their ad.
We showed some of the things that are becoming possible with our new Teracent technology. This technology can dynamically alter the creative elements of an ad in real-time to make it more relevant and effective, depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website and the time of day.
You might be familiar with Google Goggles, a way to search the web on mobile devices just by taking a picture. We gave a preview of some experimental uses of Google Goggles that could one day enable advertisers to deliver great display ads to users. Imagine pointing your phone’s camera at an ad for a car in a magazine, and having the car appear in 3D in your mobile device. Or pointing at a movie poster and having the movie trailer play in the device, right in your hand. No QR codes, no downloads!
We even showed a fun example of what rich media can do—our speech was broadcast live in a number of expandable ad units across the web, and was updated with tweets in real time.
We think that display advertising has a pretty exciting future and we’ll continue our work to make it even better. Thanks to everyone who came along to watch in New York, or who tuned in online. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, our speech will be available here later today.
Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management and Barry Salzman, Managing Director of Media & Platforms - Americas
Google Suggest was supposed to help users type a query by providing useful suggestions. Unfortunately, some of the suggestions are offensive and Google had to filter the searches related to pornography, violence, and hate speech.
Google's over-protective algorithms now filter all the suggestions that include "is evil", "I hate", "[ethnic group] are" (for example, "chinese are"). Google Suggest also filters "Smells Like Teen Spirit", the name of a popular Nirvana song.
"Queries in autocomplete are algorithmically determined based on a number of objective factors (including search term popularity) without manual intervention," explains Google. Google Suggest's filtering flaws are more obvious, now that Google Instant previews the results without having to press Enter. If you type [google is e], Google no longer previews the results and suggests to "press Enter to search".
Google Blacklist (not safe work and potentially offensive) lists some of the rules used by Google to censor the list of suggestions. "Like everything these days, great care must be taken to ensure that as few people as possible are offended by anything. Google Instant is no exception. Somewhere within Google there exists a master list of "bad words" and evil concepts that Google Instant is programmed to not act upon, lest someone see something offensive in the instant results... even if that's exactly what they typed into the search bar."
Up to now, Google Apps administrators had to sign requests for calls to Google Apps APIs using their username and password (this is called ClientLogin Authorization).
From today, Google Apps now supports OAuth authorization on Google Apps APIs.
There are several advantages to using OAuth instead of the username/password model: - OAuth is more secure: OAuth tokens can be scoped and set to expire by a certain date, making them more secure than using the ClientLogin mechanism. - OAuth is customizable: Using OAuth, administrators can create tokens that scripts may only use to access data of a particular scope when calling Google Apps APIs. For instance, a token set to call the Email Migration API would not be able to use login credentials to access the Google Apps Provisioning API. - OAuth is an open standard: OAuth is an open source standard, making it a familiar choice for developers to work with.
In 2000, Antoine Assi founded Middle Eastern export website www.aldoukan.com—it was one of the first e-commerce businesses in the Middle East. He was just 20 years old and he made time to develop the business in between computer science classes at his university. He needed a way to advertise his website from the comfort of his own dorm room, so he decided to test out Google AdWords.
His friends didn’t believe him when Antoine said he was going to sell and advertise traditional Middle Eastern foods and goods online. However, by 2004, his business had grown so rapidly that he decided to take leave from school to run it full-time. He then started his second company, www.mosaicmarble.com, which sells handcut decorative tiles online internationally.
Antoine believed there was a gap in the mosaic market and he wanted to share these artistic and historic decorations abroad. He knew there was a market for these tiles internationally—he just didn’t quite know where the opportunity existed. To identify these international growth opportunities, Antoine built on his knowledge of AdWords: He ran several AdWords campaigns, each targeted at the location and language of the test country.
From there, Antoine measured sales and percentage of website traffic from each country and campaign. He ended campaigns for countries with low sales volume and invested in campaigns for countries with higher sales volume and greater return on investment. Where he saw steady product sales, Antoine even had the company website translated into the language of the successful host country. As you can imagine, translating the site to the language of a country in which he’d already seen success only further promoted sales in that location.
Antoine refers to his AdWords campaigns as his hidden treasure, telling us that “the second month we started advertising on Google, we started feeling overwhelmed by the orders and the inquiries... We had to hire new employees on a weekly basis.”
Mosaic Marble quickly grew from two employees and eight artists to more than 40 employees and 120 artists. And the company’s website is now available in seven languages: Arabic, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese and French.
In addition to helping him expand his business, these international campaigns helped Antoine and his colleagues share these cultural icons with a larger part of the world. There are now homes and public spaces adorned with these ancient Greek creations in more than 50 countries worldwide. “Due to Google,” says Antoine, “we have customers such as the President of Congo, the Dubai Minister of Internal Affairs, the Princess of Jordan, and the Royal Music Academy of London.”
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week, our updates include a better Gmail experience for Android devices, an option for businesses and schools to strengthen their security, and dozens of new applications for customers from third-party developers and from all across Google. We also reached a big new milestone: more than 3 million businesses are now using Google Apps!
Updated Gmail app for Android On Tuesday we rolled out an improved Gmail app for Android devices, now available in the Android Market for devices running Froyo (Android version 2.2). The new Gmail app keeps the most common actions like replying and starring handy at the top of the screen, even if you scroll down through a long message. You can view content from earlier messages more easily with embedded links to “Show quoted text,” and bring a limited version of Priority Inbox with you on the go with an “Important” label for messages flagged as important.
New fonts in Google Docs Also on Tuesday, we added many new fonts to Google Docs for you to customize the look and feel of your documents. Thanks to the Google Web Font API, Google Docs can now take advantage of fonts hosted on the web, not just the limited set of fonts that most people have installed on their computers. Give Droid Serif, Droid Sans, Calibri, Cambria, Consolas and Corsiva a try, and keep an eye out for our next batch of new fonts!
Added security with two-step verification Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Edition customers can now boost the security of Google Apps by letting users take advantage of two-step verification. With this feature, signing in requires a password (something you know) and a one-time verification code provided by a mobile phone (something you have). In the coming months, we’ll be bringing the option for two-step verification to Google Apps Standard Edition users as well as hundreds of millions of individual Google users.
App Tuesday: 12 new additions to the Apps Marketplace With the help of third-party software developers around the world, we were able to continue to increase the number of applications available in the Google Apps Marketplace. This month, we added 12 new applications to the now more than 200 installable apps available, making the Apps Marketplace an even more useful resource for organizations using Google Apps to find new functionality that complements what we offer our customers ourselves.
More apps for Google Apps accounts Speaking of new applications for our customers, we’re making good on our commitment to allow dozens of additional Google applications to work with Google Apps accounts. This means that businesses, schools and organizations can start using services like Google Voice, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and much more. Most Google Apps customers can begin transitioning their organization’s Google Apps accounts immediately, and those who don’t meet the current eligibility requirements will be able to start converting soon, too.
Who’s gone Google? This week we hit some big customer milestones: more than 3 million businesses—and 30 million people within those businesses and other organizations—are using Google Apps to communicate and collaborate with Gmail and our other web-based tools.
We hope these updates help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
New import options have been added to spreadsheets. When importing, you now can create a whole new spreadsheet, append to the current sheet, add a new sheet to your existing spreadsheet or even replace your entire spreadsheet with this new version.
There's also a new custom delimiters option where you can also specify what character to parse your data file with, giving you maximum flexibility when dealing with your data files.
Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Team, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government
Languages included: All languages supported by Google Spreadsheets
How to access what's new: - When editing a spreadsheet, click on ‘File’ then ‘Import’ to select your file and see the new import options.
Two years ago today, we began Project 10^100 by asking you to share your ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible. Your spirit and participation surpassed even our most optimistic expectations. People from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 ideas. We selected 16 big ideas and asked the public to vote for their favorites. The five ideas that received the most votes are the winners of Project 10^100. Over the past 12 months, we’ve reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas, and today we’re pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:
Idea: Make educational content available online for free Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.
Idea: Enhance science and engineering education Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.
Idea: Make government more transparent Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.
Idea: Drive innovation in public transport Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.
Idea: Provide quality education to African students Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to master's and Ph.D. study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.
Here’s a short video celebrating the inspiring work of these organizations:
We’ve learned that it takes quite a bit of effort and time to move from 150,000 ideas to five funded projects, but are excited about the potential of the ideas and projects you helped us choose. We’re happy to conclude Project 10^100 with today’s announcement of five winning ideas and encourage you to follow the progress of these projects on the organizations’ websites.
Over the past few U.S. election cycles, Google and YouTube have have become catalysts for a more engaging, meaningful dialogue between citizens and government leaders. From asking questions of candidates to finding your polling place, our tools are helping to make elections and politics more personal and more democratic, and have opened up Washington, D.C. in exciting new ways.
With less than six weeks until the midterm elections, we wanted to hear from some of politics’ most creative minds about what innovation and democracy mean in 2010. So on Monday we’re joining forces with POLITICO to host an event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where we’ll discuss the increasing contributions of technology to democracy and the political process.
As part of the event David Axelrod and Ed Gillespie will answer questions and offer thoughts and predictions about the upcoming elections. Arianna Huffington will then moderate a panel about innovation in media, and will be joined by Becki Donatelli, Stephen Hayes, Nate Silver and Amy Walter. We’ll also demonstrate tools built for citizens and government officials using YouTube and Google Maps, and will be joined by our friends on the politics team at Facebook.
The panelists want to hear from you, so if you’d like to submit a question for any of them, you can do so at youtube.com/citizentube. You’ll also be able to watch the entire event live on YouTube on Monday.
As we approach the election homestretch, we’ll continue to develop useful ways for voters and campaigns to engage one another around the important issues in 2010.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Elections and Public Sector Programs
Google Spreadsheets improved the feature that lets you import files. After uploading a file, you can preview it, select a separator character and choose where to put the data. You can create a new spreadsheet, insert a new sheet, replace the spreadsheet or only the current sheet, append the data to the current sheet or replace the data starting from the selected cell.
You can't select multiple delimiters, exclude certain columns or pick the data format before importing the file. These features are available in Microsoft Excel and, even though some them aren't necessary, they make it easier to properly import the data you need.
YouTube added more features to the "plus" button displayed when you mouse over a video thumbnail. Until now, the button could only be used to add videos to a queue, so you can play them later. If you click on the small arrow next to the button, you can add the video to your favorites or to one of your playlists. It's much easier to build playlists from search results and from related videos.
Another change is that the "save to" drop-down has been replaced with a button that adds the video you're currently watching to the queue. Click on the arrow next to the button and you can add the video to a playlist.
When you add a video to the queue, YouTube shows a small bar that lets you manage the videos from the queue, save them as a new playlist, disable autoplay or load one of your playlists.
Google Reader's blog announced that the feed generator for pages that don't have feeds will no longer be available starting from September 30. Google says that not many people used this feature, which is not surprising, considering that it's quite difficult to find it.
Google Reader's page tracking feature was useful to monitor the web pages that don't have feeds. For example, you could use it to find when Google changes the privacy policy, when Google Chrome adds new extension APIs or when there are new products in the Google Store.
Unfortunately, Google Reader's feeds looked terrible. The title for each item was "generated feed for [URL]", the feature didn't detect new images and the feeds were updated when the new versions of the pages were added to Google's search index. Here's Google Reader's feed for google.com and here are the changes found by Page2RSS. Page2RSS found 8 changes in September, while Google only found one. Page2RSS has another important advantage: the service constantly monitors web pages and it's not tied to a search engine that indexes billions of web pages.
Internet Explorer users who can't update the browser or switch to a better browser have another option for running modern web apps: Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in that uses Google Chrome to render the pages that include a required tag. Chrome Frame is now out of beta and can be installed if you use Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8.
Google Chrome Frame is especially valuable for enterprise users, so Google added a MSI installer that helps IT administrators deploy the software in a network.
Microsoft has recently released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 and showed that it can develop a browser that's fast, standards-compliant and better suited for running web apps. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 9 can't be installed in Windows XP, which is still the most popular operating system. Even if Internet Explorer 8 has been released more than one year ago, almost half of the users haven't upgraded to the latest version of the browser.
Chrome Frame is already used by many Google services: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Orkut and other services will start to support it soon. Chromium's blog says that the main goals are to "to improve performance and ease the transition for users as they drop support for legacy browsers". After installing Chrome Frame in Internet Explorer 8, I noticed that Google Reader loaded much faster and had a better performance. If you want, you can load all the pages using Chrome Frame, but it's not recommended to do that.
If it seems to you like every day Google releases a new product or feature, well, it seems like that to us too. The central place we tell you about most of these is through the official Google Blog Network, where you’ll find more than 100 blogs covering all kinds of products, policy issues, technical projects and much more.
But if you want to keep up just with what’s new (or even just what Google does besides search), you’ll want to know about Google New. A few of us had a 20 percent project idea: create a single destination called Google New where people could find the latest product and feature launches from Google. It’s designed to pull in just those posts from various blogs. We hope it helps you find something useful you’ve never tried before.
Update December 13, 2011: Thanks for trying out Google New. After some thought, we've decided to stop maintaining the site. Instead, you can get your Google news from our blogs, Google+ pages or Twitter accounts, or just get an overview of all our products at google.com/about. - Ed.
Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and political perspectives. On September 22, 2002, Google News rolled out to all English-language readers, with a dedicated News tab on Google.com.
Over the years we’ve made thousands of changes to deliver more news to more users—faster, and with enhanced customization, sharing and serendipity. We’ve added video, local news, custom sections, scanned newspaper archives and a redesigned homepage. We’ve grown from 4,000 sources to more than 50,000, and from one English edition to 72 editions in 30 languages.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our loyal users and the news publishers working hard to keep you informed. Thousands of stories are made more discoverable through Google News each day. Based on the number of articles indexed by Google News, here are the largest news stories from each of the last eight years:
The 2008 election of President Obama takes the cake as the biggest news story since Google News was born.
This year, as we blow out our candles we’ll make one wish: that we serve you—our users and publishing partners—better than ever before in the years to come.
Posted by Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head, and Chris Beckmann, product manager, Google News
Ario Jafarzadeh, Experience Designer on the Gmail team, gave a great talk about Priority Inbox at the Google Zürich headquarters. "Priority Inbox, to me, typifies what I hope will be a much larger trend in online consumption... one that gives users more control over what can grab their attention vs the pure chronology based world that has dominated the web for so long," says Ario.
Priority Inbox started as a "20 percent project" at Google Zürich, back in 2008. It's been initially called Magic Inbox, a name that was referenced in Gmail's source code last year. Google wanted to hide the complexity of the feature by using a simple interface that can be customized to suit your needs. The "+"/"-" buttons that let you change the importance of a message were inspired by the street signs from Zürich.
Ario says that Priority Inbox could be improved by grouping related conversations, so you can quickly deal with multiple messages. It's just one of the many improvements that could make Gmail's inbox smarter, especially for those who receive a lot of messages.
A new version of the Gmail app is now available in the Android Market. This means the app is no longer tied to Android version releases anymore. New features include:
- Important message actions will now stick to the top of the screen, one click away, no matter how long the email is. - View previous message content more easily, just like in the desktop version of Gmail. Tap “Show quoted text” to reveal the previous message. - Limited support for Priority Inbox. If you’ve enabled Priority Inbox via the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see an “Important” label that shows all messages flagged as important. You can even add a shortcut to “Important” to your home screen.
Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government
How to access what's new: - The Gmail update requires Froyo (Android version 2.2), so it’s available if you have a Nexus One, HTC EVO, Motorola Droid 2 or Motorola Droid. (Not sure if your device is running Android version 2.2? Check here.) - Get the update from Android Market.
We work very hard to make sure that ads shown on Google provide useful information for our users. But sometimes we need to take action against ads that violate our policies, as when we block malware ads, or when we filed suit last year against “Google Money” scammers. This is especially true when it comes to advertising for products such as pharmaceuticals, which can be dangerous without the right prescription.
Like many online services, we have struggled with this problem for years. It’s been an ongoing, escalating cat-and-mouse game—as we and others build new safeguards and guidelines, rogue online pharmacies always try new tactics to get around those protections and illegally sell drugs on the web. In recent years, we have noticed a marked increase in the number of rogue pharmacies, as well an increasing sophistication in their methods. This has meant that despite our best efforts—from extensive verification procedures, to automated keyword blocking, to changing our ads policies—a small percentage of pharma ads from these rogue companies is still appearing on Google.
So this morning we filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against advertisers we believe have deliberately broken our rules. Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google. As we identify additional bad actors, we will add them to the lawsuit. Rogue pharmacies are bad for our users, for legitimate online pharmacies and for the entire e-commerce industry—so we are going to keep investing time and money to stop these kinds of harmful practices.
