Google released a Chrome extension for Web Clipboard, the Google Docs feature that lets you save and quickly retrieve text from the Web. The extension could be used to paste HTML content saved in Google Docs, to save some text you need to use on another computer or to copy multiple items to the clipboard.
"Content you copy to the server clipboard is stored on Google's servers and remains there until 30 days have passed since you last took action on (for example, copied) a given content selection," informs a help center article.
For some reason, the Web Clipboard from Google Docs doesn't show the items saved using the extension, but this is probably a bug. The extension doesn't support keyboard shortcuts, there's no contextual menu entry for copy or paste and you can't preview the text before pasting.
I still don't understand why Google Notebook was discontinued. It could've been a much better Web Clipboard.
As Americans gear up for the midterm elections on November 2, we wanted to share a few tools that make it easier to gather voting information.
When you search on Google for [polling place] or [where to vote], you’ll see a search box to help you find your polling place, candidates, and local election office. Just type in the home address where you’re registered to vote. The search looks like this:
This feature is powered by the Google Election Center, an experimental service that lets election officials provide data directly to Google in order to create a set of search tools. Anyone with a website can also provide this same functionality by embedding the open source Election Center gadget on your site, or use the gadget code or API to build your own.
And you don’t need to be at your computer to easily find this information. If you’d rather get it on your mobile device, we’ve also created a mobile landing page: m.google.com/elections.
As for election news, you’ll find a special Google News section with stories for each state so you can easily catch up on the latest headlines.
We hope all of these tools help you get and stay informed throughout the election season.
Posted by Dan Berlin, Public Sector Engineering Manager
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week we’ve overhauled local search and made other tweaks to help you find the places, products and people you’re looking for. As you plan for the World Series and Halloween, we want to help you find the perfect sports bar, costume store and chocolate bar. Here are latest updates from this week:
Google Place Search This week we introduced Place Search, a new kind of search result that organizes the world’s information around places. Whether you’re looking for a park, a great restaurant or a local plumber, you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can make comparisons and right the best sites. You should already be seeing place results automatically for many local searches. If you don’t see Place Search results at first, you can always click Places in the left-hand panel of the results page.
New product search refinements People often come to Google to do product research, so in the past couple weeks we’ve expanded Google Product Search to France and Japan. Our goal is to help you find the product information and sites you’re looking for as quickly as possible, so in May we made it easier to find relevant brands for popular product searches. Now we’re providing additional refinements for popular stores and product types. For example, search for [chocolate] and now you’ll find links for related searches for brands (Godiva, Lindt, etc.) and types (dark, hot, etc.). These refinements are unpaid and ranked algorithmically to show the most relevant searches you may be interested in.
Real-time results in Social Search This week we’ve added real-time to Social Search, so you’ll find the freshest tweets and other updates from your friends right on Google. Here in the Bay Area, everyone has been excited about watching the Giants in this year’s World Series. With our improvements to Social Search, now when you search for information about the game on Google you can see right on the results page if your friends are watching. Just look for the heading “Results from people in your social circle” to check it out.
Social Search is currently available in the U.S. For more information about Social Search, check out our blog post and help center article.
This week in searches—Halloween edition Still don’t have a costume? You’re not alone—searches for “costume ideas” continue to spike on Google. Check out this week’s special Halloween edition of the Google Beat to find out what costumes, candy and scary movies people are searching for this year.
Happy Halloween!
Posted by Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management
Gmail 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.
Previously, this feature was only available to domains whose administrators has enabled the ‘enable pre-release features’ checkbox in the Control Panel. This is now available to all Google Apps domains.
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: In Gmail ‘Settings’, go to the new ‘Conversation View’ section and choose 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, Window Mobile, iPhone, or Android device, you can access Gmail unthreaded in the native mail clients of those devices using Google’s sync tools.
Every October, it seems like every third question you hear is “What are you going to dress up as for Halloween?” We see this question reflected annually in Google searches, as millions of people turn to the Internet to help them prepare for this creepy-crawliest of holidays. Searches for “costume” have steadily risen since early August, while people look for [ideas] and then [stores] to help them carry out their vision. We’re taking our annual peek at what Halloween fun has people going to Google for inspiration.
Lady Gaga may have topped the charts of costume searches last year, but there’s a new girl in town in 2010: Snooki, one of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” stars. [snooki] topped the list of fastest rising costume searches:
Jersey Shore fans seem interested in how to get Snooki’s hair just right—[snooki wig] and [snooki costume wig] are popular related searches. People from Pennsylvania were most likely to search for [snooki costume] in October, followed—fittingly—by folks from New Jersey. Not to be left out, however, Snooki’s costars Pauly D and The Situation are also showing up as popular Halloween ideas in the past few months.
[neytiri] tops the list of related searches for [avatar costume], as people try to figure out the complexities of becoming a blue resident of another planet. Gaga folks are trying to mimic an equally tough outfit: the singer’s famous meat dress. Searches for “meat costume” have grown more than 5,000% since July. We’ve also seen rising searches for [glee cheerios costume], [justin bieber costume], [katy perry costume], [kenny powers costume] and more.
Just in the last week, we’ve seen many other Halloween-related searches on Google. On today’s Hot Trends list, for example, we’ve seen rising interest in things like [monster mash song] and [halloween sounds]. Here’s more from the Google Beat’s All Hallows Eve special:
Turning from the U.S. to other countries, we see similar costume searches, minus our favorite reality TV stars: in Canada, Australia, Ireland and the U.K., Avatar and Lady Gaga come out on top. “Alice in Wonderland” characters are popular everywhere, but only in Australia are people looking to turn themselves into the [queen of hearts]. And the U.K. distinguishes itself with searches for good old-fashioned Halloween standbys [skeleton] and [zombie]. Brits are also looking to transform themselves into [mario] and [buzz lightyear].
One of my favorite things about Halloween at Google is all the Googlers’ children who visit campus with their parents for a special kiddie celebration. Their costumes are always creative and more importantly, adorable. That seems to be universal across the U.S.—look at the fastest rising searches related to [baby costume] in 2010:
We also saw searches for [baby lobster costume], [baby yoda costume], [baby ladybug]. [baby bat] and [baby lion]. (And [baby spice], but that’s neither here nor there.) Costumes for kids aren’t too far off from adult costumes, with Avatar and Gaga atop the heap, however, you might see a lot of [werewolf kids] trick-or-treating this weekend, and the occasional [strawberry shortcake].
Last but not least, we can’t leave our canine friends out of the fun. This year, it seems people are taking inspiration from the movies to turn their pups into [slinky dog]s—the term has gone up 350%. People also seem to like to make their dogs another beast for the day, whether a [pig dog] or a [shark dog], or into a food item in a [taco dog costume] or the classic [hot dog costume]. Finally, you might see some dogs matching babies in your neighborhood, as we’ve seen growing interest in [lobster dog costume] and [yoda dog costume], although the latter is not rising as fast as [ewok dog costume].
We're celebrating "Googleween" today, and as always, Googlers and their kids are dressing to the nines in costumes of all kinds:
One thing’s for sure—with all these ideas, there’s no excuse not to dress up! So whether you’re going as Gaga or Yoda this weekend—or something we couldn’t even dream of—we hope you have a happy Halloween.
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.
In the last few weeks, we made Gmail better for iPhone and iPad users and improved Google Docs with easier image uploads to documents and enhanced charts in spreadsheets. The business and education crowd will enjoy the addition of automated workflow capabilities in Google Sites, the ability to remotely manage security on Android devices and a new batch of third-party applications that integrate with Google Apps.
Improvements to Gmail in mobile Safari If you’re reading this post on an iPhone or an iPad, head over to gmail.com to see how we made the Gmail experience in mobile Safari work more like a native application. First, scrolling is a whole lot more responsive to your touch gestures. A quick flick will scroll the page much faster than before. We’ve also improved the toolbar so it stays put at the top of the screen, even when you scroll down a long page. This keeps the most common actions in Gmail right at your fingertips—literally.
Chart improvements and drag-and-drop images in Google Docs Last Tuesday we added the ability to drag and drop images to Google documents from your desktop or from folders on your computer. You can still add images through the image upload wizard, but this new method can save time, especially when you have several images to add. This week we also rolled out improvements to charts and visualizations in Google spreadsheets. You can now add annotated timelines, organizational charts, gauges, motion charts that visualize data changing over time, and other chart types more easily. The new chart editor helps you customize the design of your charts, and now you can publish dynamic charts on other web pages that automatically update when data in the source spreadsheet changes.
Automated workflow in Google Sites with Google Apps Script Last week we introduced the ability for you to add automated workflow to Google Sites, powered by Google Apps Script. Scripts automate tasks such as sending emails, scheduling calendar events, creating and updating site pages using data from other systems, and more. For example, you can put a button on a course registration page that adds the course to the user’s calendar, sends them a confirmation email and includes their name in the course roster within the site.
Android device management Just yesterday, we added the ability for businesses and schools using Google Apps to remotely manage security on users’ Android devices (Android 2.2 and beyond), whether those devices are user-owned or provided by the organization. This update rounds out our device management capabilities; now administrators can perform functions like remotely wiping Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and many Nokia phones from the Google Apps control panel without needing any special hardware or software. Administrators running BlackBerry® Enterprise Server can manage their users’ BlackBerry® devices from the control panel as well.
App Tuesday: seven new additions to the Apps Marketplace The number of third-party software applications available in the Google Apps Marketplace that seamlessly integrate with Google Apps continues on its rapid growth trajectory. This month, we added seven new applications that complement the growing set of applications offered directly by Google. We were especially pleased to see strong international representation among this new crop.
Who’s gone Google? Google Apps is really taking off, and we’re excited to team up in the cloud with Virgin America. But they’re not the only large organization to “go Google” recently. Multnomah County in Oregon is moving 4,500 county employees to Google Apps, and the state of Wyoming is doing an even larger deployment with 10,000 state employees. Across the board, these organizations chose to switch because of substantial cost savings and tremendous productivity improvements made possible with Google Apps.
We also reached a big milestone in the education world recently: more than 10 million students, faculty and staff are actively using Google Apps at schools and universities worldwide. While we’re focused on bringing the next 10 million education users onto Google Apps, we still took some time to celebrate how far we’ve already come—with the help of the USC marching band!
I 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
The United States midterm election is on Tuesday, November 2, and we encourage all eligible US citizens to get out and vote. We’ve made it easy to find your polling place and follow election news by visiting our Election Center mobile site at m.google.com/elections on your Android-powered phone or iPhone.
Enter the address where you’re registered to vote, and we’ll show you a Google Map of your polling place. The Election Center site also has information about candidates running for office in your area.
So come Tuesday, let your mobile phone guide you to your polling place, and let sanity guide your vote!
The new version of the Connector contains the following changes: - Support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.2. - Support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express. - Support for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 SP2. - Improved Dynamic GAL synchronization. - Improvements to some calendar synchronization components to provide enhanced robustness and accuracy.
Android Device Management has now been released to help administrators manage Android mobile devices and is being rolled out in the next few days.
This allows Google Apps admins to set device policy through the Control Panel for Android devices running version 2.2. Policies enforceable on Android devices include: - Control if policy needs to be enforced before device can sync Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts - Require device to have a PIN - Define password complexity - Remote Wipe - Number of attempts before device is wiped - Idle lock timeout
These policies can be enforced on devices that have installed the Google Apps Device Policy application, which will be available from Android Market in the next few days.
Editions included: Premier and Education Editions
Languages included: US English Only (Next Generation Control Panel)
How to access what's new: Administrators can log into the Control Panel, then ‘Service Settings’ and ‘Mobile’ to access the new settings.
To learn more about these updates in mobile device management for Google Apps, join us for a live webcast with Mayur Kamat, Google Apps Product Manager, on November 10, 2010 at 9 a.m. PDT / 12 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT. Register now.
Lately, we’ve been working on giving you even better ways to find nearby places with Google Maps for Android, such as the Places icon and rich Place pages. Today, we are launching Google Maps 4.6 with a new design for Place page reviews, more options to filter search results, and a Google Latitude real-time updating option.
Place page reviews Now, you’ll see that Place pages on Android Maps share the same new design for displaying reviews as used by Place pages on your computer. You can see:
“Reviews from around the web” for highlighting sites that have high-quality reviews about the place.
“Reviews from Google users” for reviews posted directly to Google Maps by other users
Filter search results Of course, you’ll first need to narrow down which Place page reviews to check out. In addition to distance and ratings, you can also filter results for some searches by:
Open now
Neighborhood
Related searches
Find the right place with the updated reviews section (left) or search results filters (right).
Google Latitude real-time updating In Latitude, you can also choose an experimental “Real-time updating” option from an individual Latitude friend’s profile page to help meet up with them by temporarily seeing faster location updates (friends must have Maps 4.6 and Android 2.2+).
Get Google Maps 4.6 for Android 1.6 and above everywhere Maps is already available. Just search for Google Maps in Android Market (or tap here from your phone).
Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum.
Posted by Michael Siliski, Product Manager, Google Mobile Team
YouTube's playlist bar that shows up at the bottom of the page when you open a playlist or you click on a video from your subscriptions has a new use: displaying the list of liked videos after clicking on the "like" button. It's also used to display the videos from a playlist after adding a new video to the playlist. Unfortunately, this isn't very useful, the bar is annoying and it can slow down your browser. If you have hundreds of liked videos, adding all of them to the bar takes a while and the browser is no longer responsive.
Many YouTube users complain about this new feature: "Starting today, whenever I like a video, a bar pops up at the bottom of the page to tell me it was added to liked videos (a reminder that I don't need) - and then that bar freezes my browser and I can only close it with ctrl+alt+delete."
YouTube should fix the bugs and add an option to disable the bar. You can report this problem by clicking on "report a bug" at the bottom of the page.
With over 200,000 devices activated each day, Android is seeing rapid adoption, and today we are launching new administrative controls that make it possible to securely manage these devices in the Google Apps environment. With this launch, Google Apps provides a comprehensive mobility solution for all major mobile platforms. You can manage most mobile devices right from the browser, without having to deploy dedicated servers.
Many Android devices feature tight integration with Google Apps, including native applications for Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar, as well as mobile access to Google Docs. Now any employee with an Android device running version 2.2 - personal or company-issued - can access their corporate information while allowing administrators to enforce data security policies such as:
Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices
Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity
Require a device password on each phone
Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords
Require passwords to include letters and numbers
When the employee leaves the company, the administrator can withdraw access to corporate info, which allows the employee to continue to use their device if it’s their own
These policies can be enforced on devices that have installed the Google Apps Device Policy application, which will be available from Android Market in the next few days. They will be available free to all Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers in the next few days, and can be accessed from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel.
To learn more about these updates in mobile device management for Google Apps, join us for a live webcast with Mayur Kamat, Google Apps Product Manager, on November 10, 2010 at 9 a.m. PDT / 12 p.m. EDT / 6 p.m. GMT. Register now
Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President of International Sales, Google Enterprise
Go to gmail.com from your iPhone and you’ll notice two improvements we’ve rolled out over the past few weeks. First, scrolling is snappier: the speed of scrolling reflects the speed of your swipe gesture. This is helpful for long conversations where a few quick flicks will get you to the information you need much faster than before. Second, the toolbars stay on screen while you’re scrolling rather than moving down into view after each scroll. Being able to access your toolbars from any point on the page should make it easier to triage your email and move around the app.
If you use Gmail in your mobile browser a lot, you may have noticed that we recently tried several different variations of these buttons. We‘ve iterated on the design and made improvements based on your feedback. If you have more suggestions, please post them in our forum, or if you use Twitter, mention #gmailmobile and we'll take a look. If you’re a developer and are interested in learning about the Javascript and HTML techniques we used to do this, we’ll post an article to code.google.com/mobile in the coming weeks.
You can see these improvements by visiting gmail.com from the browser of iPhone and iPod touch devices running iOS4 (English-only for now). And if you like Gmail in mobile Safari, make getting to it easier by tapping the “+” at the bottom of the screen and then “Add to Home Screen.” (Don’t see the new changes yet? Try clearing your cache and refreshing the page.)
Update, 12/8/10 9:10am PST: We promised you a code article. Here it is!
With less than a week left until the U.S. 2010 midterm elections, interest is heating up around the country—in polling places, close races and hot political issues. We thought we’d peek into the search data to see what we could find about what kinds of info people are looking for as they get ready to go to the ballot box next Tuesday. We used a combination of Insights for Search and internal tools to dig up this data, and all searches studied are anonymous.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen rising searches for things like [voter registration], [early voting] and [absentee voting] as people prepare for Election Day. People are also looking for information on [polls] (check out our elections rating site to compare expert predictions). What are the issues occupying people’s mind as they choose who to vote for? Looking at the most popular searches on Google News in October, the issues that stand out are the economy (we continue to see many searches for terms like [unemployment] and [foreclosures]), as well as immigration and health care.
At our headquarters in California, we’re of course paying close attention to two high profile races in this state: the Senate race between Carly Fiorina and incumbent Barbara Boxer, and the governor’s race between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown. Looking the gubernatorial candidates, Brown has been leading in the polls recently, but in the search race, Whitman has the edge, with more than 50% more search volume in 2010 than Brown. Fittingly, Sacramentans are more likely to search for both Whitman and Brown, followed by Angelenos and then San Franciscans. Popular related searches show people looking for information about polling data as well as the candidate debates: we saw searches spike for both candidates on September 29 and October 13, two days that followed debates. There was also a spike around the time of the primary election on June 8, as well as on October 8, when a controversial comment by an aide of Brown’s hit newsstands.
We also wanted to find out what the big issues people were interested in about each candidate. Naturally, we saw a lot of searches for things like [meg whitman bio] or [jerry brown wikipedia], as well as [meg whitman ad] or [jerry brown platform] and vice versa. Terms more specifically related to Meg Whitman include [housekeeper] and [immigration]—reflecting interest in reports that Whitman had employed an undocumented worker as her housekeeper, and corresponding interest in the candidate’s views on immigration and immigration reform. People also want to know about her history at [ebay] and about her family (with the terms [husband] and [children] showing up in searches related to Whitman). But this being California, people are also looking for information about how Whitman would approach the problem of the state’s budget and economy—after immigration, the next issue we saw turn up in terms related to Whitman was [spending]. Interestingly, immigration was also the number one issue in searches related to Jerry Brown. People also seem to be looking for information about Brown’s previous term as governor, and, as with Whitman, we’re seeing searches for information about his [wife].
There’s also growing interest in one of the propositions on California’s ballot this year: Proposition 19, which would legalize and allow regulation of certain marijuana activities. Even though Prop 19 is a state initiative, its implications have people across the country searching for information about it:
Moving across the country, another state that’s grabbed headlines during this primary season is Delaware. Prior to her upset win in the Republican primary against former governor Mike Castle in September, searches for Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell were minimal—even though she’d been in the running since March. Since then, however, she’s been a subject of conversations across the country and searches for her name have consequently risen as well.
Searchers looked for information on a comment O’Donnell made on Bill Maher’s show in 1999 about [witchcraft]—it’s one of the top terms related to searches for O’Donnell. People also are interested in an [snl] spoof of O’Donnell earlier this month. O’Donnell is clearly outmatching her Democrat opponent Chris Coons in search, but only time will tell how the votes play out.
The potential shift in power in the House and Senate following these elections has people closely watching a handful of races to see which party comes out on top. We took a look at the Insights for Search graphs for a handful of close races and races that are considered influential. Take a look at the links below to see more, and plug in the names and other states of other candidates to try it out for yourself:
Of course, no discussion of this election season would be complete without a look at the Tea Party. The grassroots movement has captured the nation’s attention, and has people looking for information about the history of the original Boston Tea Party and related events, like the [boston massacre] and the [tea act], in addition to the more expected searches for information on [tea party rally] or [tea party platform] and figures like [sarah palin] and [glenn beck].
And finally, we’ve also seen some popular political rallies in the past few months. Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally in Washington, D.C. in late August kicked things off, and inspired Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to host their own events—the March to Keep Fear Alive and the Rally to Restore Sanity, respectively—both of which are taking place this coming Saturday in D.C. Searches related to all of these rallies, especially Stewart’s, have seen huge increases in volume—above 5000%.
We’ll be back soon with more search trends and other information about the mid-term elections. In the meantime, don’t forget to vote!
I love to discover new places, from sandwich shops in my neighborhood to great museums around the globe. When I start looking for something in a new area, like a barbecue restaurant in Austin, I usually do quite a few searches. I might search for a list of restaurants and then search for details about each place, like which one has the best atmosphere and live music.
Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. Say you’re looking for that great barbecue restaurant with live music. With Place Search here’s what you’ll get:
The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and links from across the web. I can see that Stubb’s has live music, and I can click citysearch.com, tripadvisor.com and other sites to read reviews. In the past, the same search would return links with information about Stubb’s in different parts of the results page (here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like). Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.
Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when we predict you’re looking for local information. In addition, you’ll find a new link for “Places” in the left-hand panel of the search results page so you can switch to these results whenever you want. For example, when I’m in New York, I love to go out and play foosball, but a search for [foosball] doesn’t automatically show me Place Search results. If I click “Places” I get the new view:
We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places. With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names (“stubb’s bbq” is the same as “stubbs bar-b-que”).
One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.
Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more than 40 languages in the next few days. During the roll-out process you can use this special link to preview the new results. Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!
What happens when you archive or delete a conversation from your inbox in Gmail? Google goes back to the inbox and you need to select the next conversation.
If you enable "Auto-advance" in Gmail Labs, you can change this behavior. The default option is to go to the older conversation, but you can also ask Gmail to send you to the newer conversation if you usually read the oldest messages first.
Gmail automatically advances to the next conversation after archiving, deleting, flagging as spam, moving or muting a conversation.
Gmail's blog reminds us that there are two useful shortcuts for archiving and going to the next/previous conversation: ] and [, but they're difficult to remember and not many people use keyboard shortcuts.
Dave P., a reader of this blog, spotted a new UI for the views and layers offered by Google Maps. The new interface enlarges the buttons that let you switch to the satellite view and to the embedded Google Earth, removes the button that lets you switch to the traditional view and adds a layer panel that's only displayed when you mouse over the satellite button.
Another change is that the list of recent searches and Google Maps views is displayed in the layer panel, so you can quickly switch between custom maps, driving directions, local search results and Google Maps layers.
New charts editor: We’ve added a new charts editor that suggests recommended charts, matches your data labels and headers, auto selects colors, has a full size preview pane and more. The editor is designed to help you create the chart you need in just a few clicks.
New and improved charts: New chart types have been added such as annotated time-lines, organizational charts, gauges, our popular motion chart (which makes it easy to visualize data changing over time) and more to our chart types.
Improved publishing: It’s easy to show charts you’ve created in spreadsheets with the world. Publish your interactive chart on any webpage and it will update as you change the data in your spreadsheet.
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 data in a spreadsheet, click ‘Insert’, then ‘Chart’ to view the new chart editor and chart types.
Here's a cool tip from a Reddit user: you can press 1 to jump to 10% into the video, 2 if you want to jump to 20%, 3 for 30% and so on. If you press 0, you'll go back to the beginning of the video. You don't have to watch the video on YouTube's site, the trick works even for embedded videos. An important note: don't use the numeric pad.
YouTube offers many other useful shortcuts: * left/right arrow - seek backward/forward 5 seconds * ctrl+left/ctrl+right - seek backward/forward 10% * home/end - seek to the beginning/last seconds of the video * spacebar - play/pause when the seek bar is selected
Here's a video you can use to try the shortcuts (make sure that the seek bar has focus by clicking on the small play button):
Today, we’re excited to announce that Virgin America is the latest company to go Google and switch to Google Apps. Over the next two weeks, all of the airline’s 1,700 employees based across North America will be moving their corporate email to Gmail, and collaborating more efficiently using Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. Their migration to Gmail will cut Virgin America’s email system costs by about half on an annual basis, in addition to the long-term storage benefits where the move into the Google cloud will save them over 18 terabytes of space as the airline continue to grow and add employees.
Photos of our skywriting this afternoon
To make it easier for Virgin America make the switch, one of our Google Apps Authorized Resellers, SADA Systems, will be helping them deploy Google Apps, implementing single sign-on user access so that users can use one password to log in to multiple applications, integrating with telephony (voicemail) systems and doing custom email configuration.
We asked Ravi Simhambhatla, Chief Information Officer for Virgin America to share his thoughts about why they decided to go Google:
As the only airline based here in Silicon Valley, our goal has always been to use the best in technology and design to reinvent the air travel experience for the better. We’re eager to bring the latest and greatest tech innovations not only to our guests—but also to our teammates. The transition to a cloud-based email system allows us to save costs and increase the speed and efficiency of our platforms, so we can focus on what we do best: elevating the flying experience. Google answers our data and connectivity needs better than any other system. Google Apps allow us to stay ahead of the competition by remaining flexible and efficient since we can upgrade based on the latest technology, and not be confined by budget or staffing to out-of-date systems. Once you have Google Apps, you always have the most recent version.
As a leading airline innovator, Virgin America has had a history of cloud firsts: in November 2008, Virgin America launched in-flight Internet with a first-ever "air-to-ground" video stream to YouTube Live. In June 2009, we collaborated on the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt to be played both in the air and on the ground, and in December 2009 we teamed up to offer free WiFi to holiday travelers. So naturally, we’re thrilled to welcome Virgin America to the cloud as they join more than 3 million companies that have gone Google. To learn more about Google Apps and the companies that have switched, visit www.google.com/gonegoogle.
Google Spreadsheets has a new editor for charts. The editor recommends charts, lets you select colors and has a bigger preview pane.
Charts look much better and you can now add timelines, organizational charts, gauges, and motion charts without using gadgets. Here are some of the new charts.
Now that we have a new version of charts, you may be wondering what will happen to your old charts. You'll be able to edit your old charts for a short time, but you'll be able to create charts using the new version only. In the long term, you can keep your old charts as view-only or you can upgrade your charts to be able to edit them. When you upgrade, your data and chart type will remain the same, but the look and feel of your chart will be improved.
YouTube might default to the the HTML5 player even if you haven't enabled the experimental feature. If you're using a supported browser (the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE9 beta, Firefox 4 beta), YouTube could test the new player.
"You are in a trial for HTML5 video on YouTube. Some users of supported browsers are automatically entered in to the trial. If you wish to leave the trial, use the link at the bottom. HTML5 is a new browser technology that allows us to show videos without the Flash plugin," explains YouTube.
If you right-click on the video, you'll see a menu that offers two options: "save video as" and "about HTML5". You might assume that "save video as" lets you download the video, but it actually sends you to this video.
Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organizations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we’re eager to play our part on the technology side—experimenting with new ways of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and YouTube Direct to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.
But while we’re mostly focused on working with news organizations to develop better products for users, we also believe it’s crucial to encourage innovation at the grassroots level. That’s why we’re giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations that are working to develop new approaches to journalism in the digital age. Our aim is to benefit news publishers of all sizes.
We’ve granted $2 million to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has a proven track record of supporting programs that drive innovation in journalism. It will use $1 million to support U.S. grant-making in this crucial area. The other $1 million will augment the Knight News Challenge, which is accepting funding proposals from anyone, anywhere in the world, until December 1. Now in its fifth year, the News Challenge has supported projects like DocumentCloud, which aims to bring more investigative-reporting source material online so anyone can find and read it.
We’re eager to do even more internationally, so we will be investing the remaining $3 million in journalism projects in other countries through a similar partnership. Stay tuned for more details early next year.
We hope these grants will help new ideas blossom and encourage experimentation. As Thomas Edison once said, “When there’s no experimenting, there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward.” We look forward to working with the journalism community to help digital news move forward.
Posted by Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development
Earlier this month, a small team from Google and YouTube spent a week in Iraq on a trip arranged by the Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO). Our goals were to explore opportunities for Google in Iraq, to understand the landscape of Internet access and connectivity in the country during this critical transition period and to bring top-voted questions from YouTube to Iraqi leaders in a series of interviews. We met with students, private sector companies, NGOs and Iraqi leadership in the Kurdish city of Erbil in the north, and in Baghdad.
Pictures taken by the Google/YouTube team in Iraq: Harry Wingo (Policy), Carrie Farrell (Google.org), Debu Purkayastha (Corp Dev), Olivia Ma (YouTube), Mary Himinkool (Business Development) and Steve Grove (YouTube).
Regardless of your feelings about the Iraq War, it’s immediately evident upon arrival just how completely the country missed the Internet boom during Saddam Hussein’s regime. Internet penetration rates in Iraq are among the lowest in the Middle East—somewhere between one and eight percent. Only 15 percent of Iraqis say they use the web, and the largest percentage of them live in Baghdad. There are no commercial data centers in Iraq and much more fiber connectivity is needed to meet consumer needs. Most connections are via satellite, and those who do have connections pay dearly for it—we heard estimates of up to $150 U.S. dollars per month for a 512kb connection. To incentivize and enable private companies to lay more fiber in Iraq, a complex set of roadblocks must be addressed—from security concerns to regulatory frameworks to licensing structures. As the country is still struggling to form a government more than seven months after its last election, much of this progress has been stalled.
There are signs of progress, however. Mobile penetration has skyrocketed in Iraq in the past seven years, from effectively zero percent in 2003 to over 70% today. And the Iraqi people are highly educated. We met with dozens of computer science students at Salahaddin University in Erbil and at Baghdad University, and though they lack equipment and resources, they’re highly motivated to innovate and believe the web is a critical component of their economy’s future.
Many young people in Iraq and around the world submitted questions in Arabic and English for three interviews we conducted in partnership with Middle Eastern news agency Al Arabiya. Google Translate enabled anyone to vote on their favorite questions regardless of language, and we brought the top five questions to current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil, Dr. Barham Salih and Iraqi politician and once the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi. Here is the television special that Al Arabiya produced showcasing their answers:
The Iraqis we met consistently expressed their desire for increased access to the web and for more access to content and tools in both Kurdish and Arabic. We believe access to information and high-speed connectivity to the cloud will be key to the future of the country. The power of the web to change people’s lives grows the further one gets from Silicon Valley, and we look forward to continuing our work with companies, governments and citizens in Iraq and other countries in transition.
Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development, and Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics
Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator is a visualization tool for popular Google searches. Enter an incomplete query, replace one of the keywords with "X", add three options for "X" and the tool will find the overlapping suggestions.
For example, if you enter "How can I get my X to", where "X" is: "wife", "cat", "dog", you'll find overlapping suggestions like: "How can I get my {wife, cat, dog} to lose weight", "How can I get my {cat, dog} to gain weight".
* Why is {America, Canada, Europe} so ... * My {friend, wife, husband} is addicted to ... * Why are {Chinese, Korean, Japanese} so ... * Why is {C, PHP, Java} so ...
You should keep in mind that Google's suggestions are determined algorithmically based on the popularity of the search terms, so you'll find many stereotypes.
Ever since Google acquired FeedBurner, the feed management service hasn't improved significantly. After a painful process of migration to Google's infrastructure and the launch of AdSense for Feeds, FeedBurner started to stagnate.
"The real story is what's new under the hood: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens. Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content."
The new interface is inspired by Webmaster Toosl and it doesn't include all the features from the old FeedBurner. It's all about stats and it's really fast. FeedBurner's real time stats will convince many people to visit the site more often and see how many Twitter users read their posts.
Arbor Networks Security Blog has an interesting post about Google's Internet traffic:
Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks. (...) A quick analysis of the data also shows Google now has direct peering (i.e. not transit) with more than 70% of all providers around the world (an increase of 5-10% from last year).
Arbor Networks uses data from more than 110 ISPs distributed across 17 countries. In 2007, Google only represented about 1% of all Internet traffic, but YouTube's growth managed to dramatically increase the percentage. Today, people are watching 2 billion videos a day, 20 times more videos than 4 years ago. According to Craig Labovitz, the overall Internet traffic grows about 45% each year.
Google Maps was the only specialized search engine from Google's sidebar that didn't have a consistent interface for search results. When you clicked on "Maps" in the sidebar, you were sent to Google Maps, a service that has a completely different interface.
Google experiments with adding a "Places" option to the menu. The main difference is that local search results are displayed inside the regular Google search interface and users no longer have to visit Google Maps
In 2005, Google merged two distinct services: Google Maps and Google Local. "Google announced the official launch of Google Local, merging the technologies behind Google Local and Google Maps. No longer in beta in the U.S. and Canada, users can visit http://maps.google.com/maps to find local search and mapping information in one place," informed Google at that time. Google Local was renamed as Google Maps after a few months. Since then, Google launched a mobile interface for local search results, a large OneBox for local results, place pages for businesses and now a separate desktop interface for local search. Back to the roots.
If you want to improve Google's results and report spammy web pages, there's a Chrome extension for you. Google Webspam Report adds a link next to each Google search result and automatically fills the spam report form with information like the URL of the page and your query.
You can also use the button from Chrome's toolbar to report pages. The most interesting feature is the integration with Chrome's browsing history that lets you select recently visited pages and recent Google searches.
Google links to a feedback form at the bottom of the search results pages and some of the options let you report spam, irrelevant pages and dead links. Unfortunately, Google doesn't make it easy to select the pages you want to report.
I met both Carl Page and Larry Page at a party hosted by a Stanford friend of mine in 1998. Carl gave me his card for eGroups and said "we're hiring". Larry gave me his card for Google — a flimsy bit of paper obviously printed by bubble jet — and said "we're hiring". I said, "Nah, who needs another search engine?" and went to graduate school. I still have the card.
He wasn't the only one who thought that search engines aren't very useful. Google's founders faced difficulties in convincing investors that a search engine is a good business. Sun's co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was the first Google investor, back in September 1998. "Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the few to see the true potential of what Brin and Page had wrought. During their presentation to him, Bechtolsheim said he had to duck out for another meeting and offered to write them a check. It was that hundred-grander, made out to Google Inc., that got the ball (and the bank) rolling. Brin and Page incorporated, managing to attract other investors, with an initial investment of around $1 million."
You can now create, edit, and launch Google Apps Scripts from any Google Site. This allows you to automate business processes that involve multiple applications.
Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Team, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government
How to access what's new: When editing a site, click ‘More actions’, then ‘Manage site’ and ‘Apps Scripts’ to build a script.
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
One of our core philosophies has always been launch and iterate. We’ll bring you a useful new feature or product, and then use both data and your feedback to continuously make it better. This week, we’re excited to announce three enhancements to some of the Google tools that have been around a while. So the next time you’re searching for the latest news, traveling abroad or looking for daily updates on a topic of interest—we’ve got you covered. Here are this week’s updates:
Realtime counter in search results Since Realtime Search launched in December of last year, we’ve steadily updated the feature making it more comprehensive and easier to use. This week we added a Realtime counter underneath the News section of your search results. Now, when people on your favorite social networks are commenting on a particular topic you’ve searched for, you can easily see how many updates have been shared, all in real-time. This makes it easy to see when a news story is popular on the social web. Click the link to see the full Realtime Search results page.
Local flavor of Autocomplete, now international It’s been more than a year since we launched localized versions of Google Autocomplete (formerly Google Suggest) that offer relevant search predictions tailored for different regions (we’re at 155 domains and growing!) More recently, we took these tailored predictions to a new level in the U.S. by targeting to specific metro areas like San Francisco and Chicago. This week, we extended these hyper-local predictions around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete. This means that the list of predictions beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than ever.
For example, when you’re in Barcelona, Spain and you start typing [rest] there’s a good chance you’re actually looking for restaurants in Barcelona:
However, if you’re in Madrid, you’ll probably want to check the restaurants there:
Better support for news-lovers in Google Alerts It might be hard to believe, but Google Alerts have been providing email updates on your topic or query of interest since all the way back in 2003. Over the course of the past few years, we've spent a lot of time improving the way Google Alerts works to handle very specific queries (like a business or hobby), and while we've still got a lot of work to do, we've made steady improvements in the quantity, freshness and relevance of the content that we send you.
However, we’ve found many people are specifying general topics like “finance,” “entertainment” or even simply “news.” Up until this week, Google Alerts would return a long list of content from across the web about these very broad topics. This worked, but we realized it’s probably much more helpful to send you the corresponding section from Google News, since it seems like you’re looking for a digest of the big topics of the day. So we’re now including News sections in Alerts if you enter one of the following terms like: news, world news, business, entertainment, finance, health, science, sports or technology. This allows you to have your favorite part of Google News delivered to your inbox every morning.
The week in searches In addition to all of these enhancements, are you curious to know what Google searches shot off the charts this week? The Google Beat gives you an inside look into the pulse of U.S. searches. In this week’s edition, we cover everything from BCS Football to Snooki.
