New From Google Blogs

Games Now Available On Android Market In Korea

2011-12-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

In the 24 months since the first Android device became available locally, Korea has quickly become the second-largest consumer of apps worldwide. The Android developer team blog today announced the of "bringing games to Android Market in Korea."

"Starting right away, Android users in Korea can explore the many thousands of popular game titles available in Android Market and download them onto their devices. For paid games, purchasing is fast and convenient through direct carrier billing, which lets users in Korea easily charge their purchases to their monthly mobile operator bills," revealed the Android developers team members.

Adding the team members said "If you are a game developer, now is the time to localize your game resources, app descriptions, and marketing assets to take advantage of this new opportunity."

Via diTii.com

Send attachments while offline

2009-11-24T17:29:00.001-08:00

One of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you're offline you won't be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message.

If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you'll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you're online or offline. This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you're online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination.

If you haven't tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:

Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
Click Save Changes.
After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline" link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

Now that you can send attachments while offline, we'd love to see pictures of you using Gmail in unusual places while you're disconnected from the web. Pictures of you using Gmail in an airplane, igloo, or submarine are all welcome. Email your photo to hikingfan@gmail.com and we'll post the most interesting ones here.

Via Official Gmail Blog

A hearty welcome to NewsGator users

2009-09-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

A little while back, our friends over at NewsGator told us that lots of people who use their client RSS readers like FeedDemon and NetNewsWire had been asking for the ability to synchronize with Google Reader, since maintaining two separate subscription lists was a hassle. Today, we're happy to report that we've worked with NewsGator to make this possible, and new versions of their client readers released today will use Google Reader as the synchronization backend. If you use one of these applications, check out NewsGator's instructions and FAQ on transitioning your subscriptions.

Now that Google Reader can be used as the online companion to NewsGator's client applications, they've decided to discontinue consumer use of NewsGator Online, their free web-based RSS reader, at the end of August. If you've been using this service, you'll need to transition your subscriptions to Google Reader. To do this, all you need to is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail), and here's a video to help you get started. To those of you who have been waiting for this integration and to those of you who are using Reader for the first time, welcome!

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback in our help group, Twitter or Get Satisfaction.

Via Google Reader

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server now available

2009-09-05T00:27:00.000-07:00

If you have a corporate BlackBerry smartphone, you might be interested to know that the Google Apps team has just made the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server available for download. This connector makes it possible to use Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts with corporate BlackBerry phones' built-in applications.

If you manage IT for your organization, you'll want to read the Enterprise team's blog post that details the Google Apps Connector.

If you don't manage IT but you want your company to adopt Google Apps and the Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, tell your IT team that it's time to "Go Google".

Via Google Mobile

YouTube Mobile App gets Five New Languages

2009-09-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

We're happy to announce that the YouTube Mobile Application for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 devices is now available in five new languages. We now support users with localized content in Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Czech. This brings the total number of languages the app supports to 12.

YouTube's Mobile Application makes it easy to quickly load and watch high-quality YouTube videos on your mobile phone, even in weak coverage areas. To get the update or to try the app for the first time, simply visit m.youtube.com/app in your phone's browser.

We'd love to get your feedback, so visit our forum if you have questions or want to chat about YouTube mobile.

Via Google Mobile

Google Adds Contact Chooser Feature to Gmail

2009-09-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we've added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the "To:" link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you'll see something like this:

You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.

If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you've already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn't offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.

Via Gmail

What Google Did Right In Yesterday’s “GFail” incident

2009-09-05T00:20:00.000-07:00

Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here's what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same routers.

The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google's architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

What's next: We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don't have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there's a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn't affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity.

Via Gmail

More ninja tips in more languages

2009-09-05T00:18:00.000-07:00

When we published the Gmail tips guide in July, we promised it would help you become a Gmail ninja. Now, if you want to become a Gmail ниндзя or 忍者, you can do that too: these tips are now available in Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and UK English.

We've also added a handful of new tips to the English site, culled from suggestions you submitted. Some of the new tricks to help manage your email efficiently include sending and receiving mail from multiple addresses, adding formatting to chat messages, and selecting multiple messages at once using shift-select. Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas, and please keep them coming.

Via Gmail

Helping create responsible digital citizens

2009-09-04T17:21:00.001-07:00

With more and more kids going online, whether to connect over social networking sites, mingle in chat rooms or play games, it's become increasingly important for families, schools and service providers to work together to ensure that the younger generation understands their responsibilities while they explore the virtual world.

A few weeks ago, Google participated in the 21st Annual Crimes Against Children Conference in Dallas, where over 3,500 members of law enforcement, child advocacy groups, the tech industry and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) convened to share ideas, discuss strategies and explore new technologies designed to combat the many and varied forms of crimes against children. We had the opportunity to describe some of the positive steps Google is taking to educate and safeguard minors who use our products and services, as well as the unique ways we support the individuals on our staff who do child exploitation-related work.

According to a recent NCMEC study in patterns and trends in online child victimization, the past few years have seen a 6% increase in reports of kids providing images and videos of themselves when asked by online acquaintances; sending naked photos of themselves through text messages ("sexting"); and cyber-bullying. This new trend underscores the need to educate our younger users, their families and teachers on ways to create and enjoy safe online experiences.

We're doing our part by working with child safety organizations and law enforcement around the globe to spread positive messages about life online. For example, in mid-September, we're launching a global training program on YouTube to help teens teach other teens about these issues. This is just one step among many that we're taking to help create a generation of responsible digital citizens.

Voices of support for the Google Books settlement

Posted: 04 Sep 2009 07:45 AM PDT

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst

We've spent a lot of time with authors, publishers, academics, civil rights groups and other communities this summer discussing how the Google Books settlement will impact them. We've met individually with a number of organizations and participated in their events. And we've hosted our own forums across the country.

Yesterday, we took part in another call with even more groups, including the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Federation of the Blind, the United States Students Association and others, who together voiced their support for the agreement.

These groups, along with many others we've heard from in past months, represent a large and diverse collection of many millions of people, and they believe, like we do, that providing more access to more books is of critical importance. They have voiced their support through videos, op-eds, and tweets, as well as through statements sent directly to the Court.

In editorials, The New York Times and the Washington Post have echoed the importance of increasing access to information. And just this week, The Economist weighed in with its support for the approval of the settlement and cited the benefits for authors, publishers, libraries and researchers "from Manhattan to Mumbai."

We continue to be inspired by these stories, and we've gathered them all on a new site that can be found here. We know this is a complex issue, and we want to make sure all of these voices are heard. As we get closer to the court date for the settlement approval, we anticipate there will be even stories more to share. And we'll make sure to add them to this site.

Android Developers Blog: Android Layout Tricks #2: Reusing layouts

2009-02-26T17:36:00.005-08:00

Android comes with a wide variety of widgets, small visual construction blocks you can glue together to present the users with complex and useful interfaces. However applications often need higher level visual components. A component can be seen as a complex widget made of several simple stock widgets. You could for instance reuse a panel containing a progress bar and a cancel button, a panel containing two buttons (positive and negative actions), a panel with an icon, a title and a description, etc. Creating new components can be done easily by writing a custom View but it can be done even more easily using only XML.

In Android XML layout files, each tag is mapped to an actual class instance (the class is always a subclass of View.) The UI toolkit lets you also use three special tags that are not mapped to a View instance: <requestFocus />, <merge /> and <include />. The latter, <include />, can be used to create pure XML visual components. (Note: I will present the <merge /> tag in the next installment of Android Layout Tricks.)

The <include /> does exactly what its name suggests; it includes another XML layout. Using this tag is straightforward as shown in the following example, taken straight from the source code of the Home application that currently ships with Android:

<com.android.launcher.Workspace     android:id="@+id/workspace"     android:layout_width="fill_parent"     android:layout_height="fill_parent"      launcher:defaultScreen="1">      <include android:id="@+id/cell1" layout="@layout/workspace_screen" />     <include android:id="@+id/cell2" layout="@layout/workspace_screen" />     <include android:id="@+id/cell3" layout="@layout/workspace_screen" />  </com.android.launcher.Workspace>

In the <include /> only the layout attribute is required. This attribute, without the android namespace prefix, is a reference to the layout file you wish to include. In this example, the same layout is included three times in a row. This tag also lets you override a few attributes of the included layout. The above example shows that you can use android:id to specify the id of the root view of the included layout; it will also override the id of the included layout if one is defined. Similarly, you can override all the layout parameters. This means that any android:layout_* attribute can be used with the <include /> tag. Here is an example:

<include android:layout_width="fill_parent" layout="@layout/image_holder" /> <include android:layout_width="256dip" layout="@layout/image_holder" />

This tag is particularly useful when you need to customize only part of your UI depending on the device's configuration. For instance, the main layout of your activity can be placed in the layout/ directory and can include another layout which exists in two flavors, in layout-land/ and layout-port/. This allows you to share most of the UI in portrait and landscape.

Like I mentioned earlier, my next post will explain the <merge />, which can be particularly powerful when combined with <include />.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: The Google cloud speaks 7 new languages

2009-02-26T17:36:00.003-08:00

Today felt like a normal day. I woke up and went through my normal morning routine: got my clothes together, checked the news, watched a few minutes of the Golden Girls (hey – just being honest!), and drove off through the gray day towards work. Indeed, it turned out to be an appropriately "cloudy" day.

Because without any work on my part, without any software updates or downloads, hardware patches or rewiring, today, our Google Translate team added seven new languages to our Google Translate tool in the cloud. This means that anyone using Google Translate technologies, including all the Google Search Appliance customers currently using Cross-Language Enterprise Search (a recent feature added to our Enterprise Labs), instantly had their repertoire of languages increase to include Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. With this launch, Google Translate has now achieved automatic translations between 41 languages (that's 1640 language pairs!).

This, to me, is the beauty of the cloud, and the beauty of where we're headed in Enterprise search: securely bridging the gap that had existed in traditional enterprise deployments, bringing together the best of the corporate network and the cloud. With the Google Search Appliance, you get a hardware unit that packages the powerful algorithms of Google.com, and which allows you to search all of your internal documents securely behind your corporate firewall. While this hardware sits safely in your office, tools like Cross-Language Enterprise Search, Google Apps integration and Google Sites integration, allow an IT department to tap into the unique features and "versionless" innovation possible only in the cloud.

Previously, bringing seven new languages into an enterprise search solution would have required the addition of entirely new hardware or software, taking hours or days to update and to train people on. Today, the cloud allows these innovations to flow directly into the Google Search Appliance, for any and all to take advantage of. Any Google Search Appliance customers interested in utilizing this tool and others like it can download these features in our Enterprise Labs.

Here's to future innovations - or as some might say:
"gelecek yenilikler"
"นวัตกรรมในอนาคต"
"jövőbeni innovációk"
"tulevikus uuendused"
"ardhmen novacioneve"
"innovazzjonijiet fil-futur"
"innovacións futuras"

And to all on the Google Translate team: thank you for being a friend.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise

Official Google SketchUp Blog: Modeling for the Ocean layer in Google Earth

2009-02-26T17:36:00.001-08:00

If you've been following the blog, you saw the tour of 3D models under the ocean for the Google Earth 5.0 launch. With the SketchUp maintenance software that released yesterday, you too can model your very own underwater world! The first thing you'll have to do is to download the latest version of SketchUp here. Once installed, a few simple options in SketchUp enable you to select whether your model is above or below the water:

Go to 'Window' then 'Preferences'
Choose 'Extensions' in the left column
Toggle on 'Google Earth Ocean Modeling'
Hit OK

This will give you the option to place your model wherever you want it. Next import your desired terrain from Google Earth by finding the area you want and choosing 'Get Current View' in SketchUp. Underwater terrain will import just like above water terrain. It's easy to lose your sense of scale in the ocean, and if you get a warning that reads 'Camera altitude too high...' just move closer to the ocean floor. With your terrain imported into SketchUp, you can start your model.

Once complete, decide whether your model will be on the ocean floor or on the surface. You can find that option under the 'Plugins' menu. If you're modeling on the land, or wish to model on the surface of the water, toggle it off, like this:

If you're modeling under the surface of the water, toggle it on, like this:

If you want your model to be somewhere in-between the ocean floor and the surface of the water, simply choose 'Model on Ocean Floor' and place your model above the terrain:

Last, view your model in Google Earth by choosing 'Place model', and see how it looks. If you are satisfied, load your model onto the 3D Warehouse by selecting 'Share Model' and it may show up in the 3D Buildings layer. The same terms that apply to buildings on land also apply to underwater models. Your submissions must be real, accurate, and correctly located. There are lots of opportunities for geo-located models underwater; ship wrecks, diver destinations and offshore structures! Don't forget to fill out the appropriate information on the upload page, and to check 'Google Earth ready'. And that's it! Piece of cake. Sponge cake.

Posted by Adam Hecht, 3D Data Specialist

Google LatLong: Explore more with User Photos in Street View

2009-02-26T17:35:00.001-08:00

Starting today, a new feature lets you browse popular user-contributed photos from Panoramio at major landmarks around the world. The many people who virtually visit Paris to see the famous Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral in Street View can now also browse the wide array of user photos taken in the vicinity. Just look for photo thumbnails at the top right of the Street View image, and click to view. You can also connect directly to the community behind this great photo content - a link to the author's Panoramio page is shown with every user photo.

The feature is available in many other places too: New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney and New Zealand, to name just a few. Anywhere, really, where Street View is available and where users have contributed lots of high-quality photos; of course, this usually is near famous landmarks but you never know where you'll discover more to see. With user-contributed photos you can inspect architectural details and close-up quirks, or see what is happening at a place at more than one time of day, or see whatever else it was that inspired the photographer to press the button. Take a look at this video to see more:

If you are a Panoramio user, you may already have a photo in Street View. If not, what are you waiting for? Just contribute your best photos to Panoramio and remember to geo-tag them. Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location. At the most famous places in the world, competition for space is already tough -- take a look at the range of images of the Sagrada Familia -- but on less travelled roads the world is still largely a blank canvas. Please help to fill it in!

Posted by Frederik Schaffalitzky, Software Engineer, Google Zurich

Google Open Source Blog: New Functionality for Moodle

2009-02-26T17:35:00.000-08:00

By Cristin Frodella, Google Apps for Education Team

We're always excited to jump into the world of education and when it helps Open Source, we're all the happier. Moodlerooms, a partner of Moodle, the Open Source learning management system, recently approached to fund a project which would allow Moodle users to easily integrate Google Apps Education Edition, our communication and collaboration suite. Our Open Source Programs Office sponsored the work and the result is an Open Source single sign-on integration between Moodle and Google. The best part is the extensibility features allow any educational software vendor to take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration. Check out the full story on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Browser title bar tweaks

2009-02-25T18:19:00.001-08:00

I'm often doing something on my computer and want to know if I have new mail without having to keep my Gmail window open. But if you keep Gmail minimized or in an inactive tab sometimes all you see in the browser title bar is something like "Gmail - Inbo..."

It gets worse if you use Gmail through Google Apps and/or in a language that tends to have longer words. You have to open the window to see if there is anything new.

So I added a tiny new feature to Gmail Labs called Title Tweaks that changes the order of the elements in the browser title bar to put the more important things first. Once you turn on Title Tweaks from the Labs tab under Settings, your browser title bar will display something more like "Inbox (3) - Gma...".

That way you can see how many unread messages you have even if the window is minimized.

Posted by Fëdor Karpelevitch, Software Engineer

Google Grants Blog: Movement-Building 101 on YouTube

2009-02-25T17:39:00.001-08:00

Recently, social media experts and delegates from 17 international youth nonprofits met in New York City at the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit to discuss how young people can leverage social media and technology to end violence, oppression and human rights abuses around the world.

In conjunction with the event, Howcast -- the Summit's lead sponsor and one of YouTube's most popular how-to channels -- released a series of engaging videos that concentrate on using technology to movement-build and create social change:

If you've ever wondered how to build a movement using social media, stage a nonviolent protest or create a smart mob (or wondered what a smart mob is), I highly recommend taking a look at the Alliance of Youth Movements' YouTube channel.

Posted by Ramya, YouTube

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Canonical Link Element: presentation from SMX West

2009-02-25T17:38:00.007-08:00

A little while ago, Google and other search engines announced support for a canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues. I recreated my presentation from SMX West and you can watch it below:

You can access the slides directly or follow along here:

By the way, Ask just announced that they will support the canonical link element. Read all about it in the Ask.com blog entry.

Thanks again to Wysz for turning this into a great video.

In fact, you might not have seen it, but we recently created a webmaster videos channel on YouTube. If you're interested, you can watch the new webmaster channel. If you subscribe to that channel, you'll always find out about new webmaster-related videos from Google.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: New Status Dashboard for Google Apps

2009-02-25T17:38:00.006-08:00

We made a commitment last year to increase transparency and communication with Google Apps customers in several ways. We heard your feedback around the need for better communication when issues like yesterday's Gmail outage occur.

As part of that commitment, we're pleased to announce today the availability of the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Customers can use this Status Dashboard to check on the current service status of individual services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business. Administrators of Google Apps for their businesses, schools and organizations can also view the performance of the administrative control panel.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it's also relevant to users of our consumer products. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world. In my role on the sales team, I regularly talk with customers to make sure that they're getting the most out of Google Apps and I think that you will find this tool indispensable in managing your Google Apps deployment.

Additionally, here are other resources I often recommend to help account administrators get up and running quickly and smoothly and also to stay on top of new functionality:

Google Apps Help Center. Our Help Center for Google Apps admins can answer questions on "getting started" and also help you troubleshoot or find out the status about known issues. Topics include everything from email routing to data migration. We update the information in the Help Center regularly so it's a good starting point for any questions you encounter as you setup and manage your Google Apps account.

Google Apps Help Forum. In addition to our own online support resources (see below), we have a vibrant community of Google Apps administrators who are always willing to lend a helping hand. To read tips and get help from your peers, join this discussion board for IT admins. This forum is moderated by Google Apps Advisors and fueled by the knowledge of expert Power Posters. Recent questions answered in the Help Forum include ones on IMAP functionality and MX record settings.

Google Apps update alerts. Whenever we launch improvements to any of the apps or add new administrative capabilities – whether it's a minor user interface tweak or the release of major new functionality – we publish a summary with usage instructions and links where you can find more details. For example, we recently shared information on new capabilities for administrators to authorize who can upload videos to Google Video for business and instructions for setting password strength requirements. You can automatically get this information either as email alerts to your inbox, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

Google Apps Channel on YouTube Here you can find product tutorials and overviews, as well as video testimonials from Google Apps customers and recordings of Google Apps-related talks and webinars. We recently posted a tour of a corporate intranet built by one of our customers and created a Google Apps Learning Center playlist to educate end users on topics such as "Webmail vs. Desktop," "Archiving or Deleting" in Gmail, for example. Take a look at the videos we've created.

The Solutions Marketplace. If you know that Google Apps is right for you but need some extra help, visit the Solutions Marketplace to find details about products and services from vendors whose solutions integrate and extend Google Apps. You can find vendors to help you with setup and deployment, data migration, integration with existing IT systems, user training and more. You can see how vendors have been rated by other customers and also read about customer experiences with partners.

I hope that this information helps you get the most out of Google Apps. One of the great things about Google Apps is the community that has grown up around it, thanks to you!

TubeLoc: An AS3 Player Wrapper Using LocalConnection

2009-02-12T01:53:00.001-08:00

Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

We know developers really like AS3, but sometimes they have difficulty getting our players to work correctly. To make this process easier for the Flashy/Flexy crowd, the awesome Ben Longoria has given us TubeLoc.

TubeLoc is an AS3 wrapper around the Player API that uses LocalConnection to communicate to the AS2 YouTube SWFs. It takes this a step further by also providing Flex components to make inserting a YouTube video and controls easy.

Ready to get started? First read the article that goes in depth on how to use TubeLoc. Next, visit the project page to download the code and play with the live demos. Finally, tell us what you think on the forum. Thanks Ben

Android Developers Blog: Apps that work together

2009-02-12T01:21:00.003-08:00

Android applications can easily be linked together using intents. One example of this involves Shazam, MySpace, and the Amazon MP3 Store. Once Shazam has identified a song, you can also search for the artist's official MySpace profile page or buy the song via via the Amazon MP3 app. Here, the three developers behind these apps talk about how they accomplished this:

To hear more about how the MySpace app for Android was built and lessons learned, watch Matt Kanninen:

Tomasz Zawada of Shazam also talks about his opinions on the Android platform and has some tips for developers building Android apps:

These and the other Android app developer videos can be found here.

Google Analytics Blog: Tips and Tools for Expanding Keywords Lists

2009-02-12T01:21:00.001-08:00

You can use Google Analytics to find the best keywords and shift budget to the highest converting keywords, but what if you're looking to expand your keyword lists? In this post, we are going to look at how you can leverage other free Google tools to optimize your marketing campaigns beyond Google Analytics.

1) Take a look at the best performing keywords from your Google Analytics Keyword Report.

2) Input these keywords, along with your site's URL, into the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords not currently in your AdWords campaign. Suggestions from this tool are particularly useful because they're specific to the site and keywords you define, and are based on actual, past Google queries.

3) For each keyword identified, you can then use Google Insights for Search -- a tool that allows you to see trends in what the world is searching for -- to see where regional interest is highest and better optimize through geotargeting.

You can also enter your top-performing keywords from Google Analytics directly into Google Insights for Search to identify the top-related and rising searches. This can help you expand your keyword lists and keep them current by staying abreast of related search trends.

These are just a few examples of how you can capitalize on the many Google tools available for improving your website ROI, so start expanding and optimizing your possibilities today!

Posted by Lauren Usui, Insights for Search Team

Google News Blog: Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site

2009-02-12T01:18:00.005-08:00

Posted by Abe Epton, News Online Operations Team

From time to time, publishers ask us what they can do to improve their listings in Google News. The following are eight of the most frequent, and useful, pieces of advice we give out. Why eight? Because at Google, we love powers of 2.

* Keep the article body clean

For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by
tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article's body near the title in the HTML, we'll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.

* Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique

If you reuse article URLs, our system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don't resemble a year (for example, 5232 is ok, but 2008 is not.) You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse our crawler, and we may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page. You can learn more about some of these requirements here.

* Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps

Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps us better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format we use for this data here.

* Check your encoding

We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don't do this. It hurts us.

* Make your article publication dates explicit

In order to help our crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body. Also, you can remove other dates from the HTML of the article page, and add the required tag to articles in your News Sitemap. Dates on article pages can be in most common formats, but for sitemaps, we ask that you use the W3C format; e.g. 2008-12-29T06:30:00Z.

Note that the article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which we originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.

* Keep original content separate from press releases

If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you'd like us to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. As you may know, Google News labels press releases distinctly in order to alert our users that the article they're about to read is a press release. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they're labeled correctly. You can learn more about this attribute here.

* Format your images properly

To help Google News identify your images and crawl them along with your articles, use fairly large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make sure to place them near their respective article titles on the page and make the images inline and non-clickable. Images in the JPEG format are more likely to be crawled correctly.

* Article Titles in Google News

In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don't hyperlink the headline on the article page - after all, your reader is already there! And it's always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

If you found these suggestions helpful, you might also want to check out our more general Webmaster Guidelines. The Webmaster Guidelines aren't necessarily specific to Google News, but much of the wisdom you'll find there can help make your site Google News-friendly. Our Publisher Help Center contains lots more information about many of these topics. And you can always check out the Google News Help Forum to give us feedback on these suggestions, and share other tips and advice with webmasters and News users.

Google LatLong: Australian fires update

2009-02-12T01:18:00.003-08:00

The Google Australia Blog continues to update its map of the Victoria fires, and it now includes recent satellite imagery from the Modis Rapid Response project at NASA/GSFC. You can also view the map, further information about the fires, and recent news on this site.

Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Lat Long Blog Team

Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts

2009-02-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days we've made a lot of small changes to Gmail's contact manager which, combined, should make it easier to organize the contacts you want and get rid of some of the cruft. Here's a quick summary:

1. Contact merge (and an important caveat about auto-complete)
Many of you may have seen Monday's blog post about Google Sync which mentioned contact merge. Nothing had been annoying me more than seeing several copies of "Jeff Jones" on my iPhone — only one of which actually contained his phone number. I now have one "Jeff Jones" which contains all of his contact information. To do this, select the contacts you want to merge and then click "Merge these..." as shown below:

Now that you can sync your contacts to a variety of devices, being able to merge contacts is more important than ever. Please note that as we mentioned on Monday, there's a known issue with merging contacts that affects address auto-complete, making merged addresses sometimes come up in a suboptimal order (e.g. auto-complete may bring up your friend's work address first even though you usually email their Gmail address). We're working on fixing this so the email address you use the most for any given contact will always come up first.

2. All Contacts
Instead of Suggested Contacts, you'll now see a group called All Contacts which, as the name would suggest, is where all of your contacts live and thus a good view for merging duplicate contacts. You can still see suggested contacts by clicking the "View Suggestions" button from My Contacts. From there, you can select frequently emailed contacts to add to My Contacts.

3. Remove people from My Contacts
You can finally move contacts out of the My Contacts group — especially useful if you're planning to sync your contact list to your phone. Prune the contacts you don't want synced to your phone from My Contacts (click "Groups" and then "Remove from My Contacts"), and they won't get synced.

4. Search across all contact fields
We've heard you loud and clear, and contact search now works much better: instead of just searching contact names and email addresses, it now includes phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses as well. So, if you're visiting the Bay Area and looking for friends to catch up with, you could try typing "650" or "415" in the contact manager search box.

Please keep the feedback coming — we're working hard to make Contacts better and more useful for you.

Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager, Google Contacts

New in Labs: Add your location to your signature

2009-02-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

Sometime ago I noticed how all mail systems tell you when an email was written, but not where it was sent from. Because I love to travel, the first question in many messages I receive is "where are you?" and by the time I answer I am often somewhere else.

So in my 20% time, I wrote an experimental Gmail Labs feature that detects your location and appends the city region and country names to your signature, like this:

To try it, turn on Location in Signature from the Labs tab under Settings, then go to your signature preferences and check the box next to "Append your location to the signature."

It'll use your public IP address to determine your location, so it may not always be that accurate. For example, if you're at Heathrow airport, IP detection may put you in Germany. If you want more accurate location detection, make sure your browser has a version of Gears that supports the location module. That way, Gears can make use of wi-fi access point signals to recognize that you're actually in London.

You'll always be able to disable the option or just delete your location from specific emails whenever you want.

Posted by Marco Bonechi, Software Engineer

Official Gmail Blog: Sync your contacts and calendar with your phone

2009-02-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not the most organized person in the world and that's especially true when it comes to my address book and calendar. My contacts are scattered all over the place: in my phone, in my Gmail account, on the back of business cards and even in a veritable little black book.

We're making staying organized a little easier with a beta version of Google Sync for the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones as well as a contacts-only version for many other devices. Sync uses push technology (Microsoft ActiveSync©) to automatically synchronize your Gmail contacts (using the 'My Contacts' group within Gmail) and/or your Google Calendar events in the background.

Your phone will sync using the your "My Contacts" group within Gmail. Here are some tips for cleaning up that group so it's exactly the people you want to sync, and some big caveats to be aware of in this beta release:

iPhone users: Google Sync will remove all existing contacts and calendar events from your phone, so make sure to back up (PC instructions, Mac instructions) your data before you set it up.
Remove contacts that you don't want to sync to your phone. From the "My Contacts" section of the contact manager, select the contact you want to remove, click "Groups" and then "Remove from My Contacts."
Merge duplicates so friend@theirgmailaddress.com and samefriend@theirworkaddress.com both belong to the same contact. To do so, select both contacts, and click "Merge these 2 contacts." When you merge contacts, your address auto-complete won't work as well as before. We're working on a fix for this, but until that's out you might notice addresses showing up in a suboptimal order in auto-complete, e.g. your friend's work address coming up first when you're used to emailing their Gmail address.

Once you set up Sync, changes you make to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device within minutes since the connection is over-the-air and always on. And it's two way, so your calendar and contacts are always up-to-date, no matter whether you make changes on your phone or from your browser. Also, since your information is automatically backed up to your Google account, it's securely stored even if you accidentally drop your phone in the pool. Getting your address book and calendar to a new phone is as easy as setting up Sync again.

If you have an iPhone, Windows Mobile device, or a BlackBerry, you can choose to sync both your contacts and calendar, or just one of the two. For devices that support the open SyncML protocol, Google Sync will sync your contacts, but not your calendar.

Try Sync out by visiting m.google.com/sync or visit our Help Center to review device specific instructions.

Posted by Marcus Foster, Product Manager, Google Mobile

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Multiple Inboxes

2009-02-05T21:11:00.001-08:00

Posted by Octavian "Vivi" Costache, Software Engineer

I'm seriously into filters and labels. All the email I get related to Flash goes under my "flash" label, everything about paragliding goes under "flying," and they all skip my inbox because that's how I like to stay organized. But when new email arrives I have to switch to the "flash" label first, then click on "paragliding," etc. I wanted a way to see it all at once.

So when I heard about Gmail Labs, I started implementing a Labs feature in my 20% time that would help me (and you!) spend less time monitoring important messages that may end up getting filtered away. Starting today, you can try Multiple Inboxes, a Labs experiment which makes it possible to have more than one 'inbox' in your default Gmail view.

An image is worth a thousand words, so here's what my inbox looks like:

In addition to a quick view of my important labels, I also like to keep all my starred and draft messages in separate panels.

After you turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings, you can configure what you want to see, as well as set the number of messages displayed and the positioning of your panels from the Multiple Inboxes section under Settings.

However you choose to use it, let us know how we can improve the Multiple Inboxes experiment -- all feedback is welcome.

Official Gmail Blog: See where your friends are with Google Latitude

2009-02-04T21:14:00.001-08:00

Posted by Mat Balez, Mobile Product Manager

Gmail is about keeping you in touch with the people you care about, independent of the large, or sometimes small, distances that might separate you from them. That's precisely why email, IM, and voice and video chat are so powerful -- the "where" is irrelevant.

With Google Latitude, a new feature on Google Maps for mobile and a gadget for iGoogle coming out today, we're kind of turning that idea on its head, making the "where" matter again. Latitude allows you to see where your friends are located in real time on a map, anywhere in the world.

Use your Gmail account to join Latitude and you can specify which of your Gmail contacts can see your location. You can choose to automatically detect your best location, share city-level information only, set your location manually, or hide your location altogether. (To learn more about Google Latitude's privacy controls, check out this video.)

From within Latitude you can communicate with your friends via text message, Google Talk, Gmail, or a good old fashioned phone call. Your status messages and profile picture are synced with your Gmail account, so as you update them on the go, your Gmail contacts will see the changes in real time.

To try Google Latitude, go to google.com/latitude from your computer or your phone's mobile browser. Latitude is available on Android, Blackberry, S60, Winmo, and will be coming soon to the iPhone, through the Google Mobile App.

Official Gmail Blog: New ways to label with "Move to" and auto-complete

2009-02-03T21:18:00.001-08:00

Posted by Emil A Eklund, Gmail engineer

One of the features that makes Gmail different is its use of labels instead of folders. Sure, labels can serve pretty much the same purpose -- they can help organize mail or flag messages for follow up. And unlike with folders, messages can have several labels, so if I get an email from a friend about a trip we're taking together, I can add both a "Friends" and a "Travel" label to it.

But it's not always obvious how to use labels, especially for people who are new to Gmail and used to using folders, and it hasn't helped that some common tasks have been more complicated than they should be. For instance, to move an email out of your inbox and into a label you first had to apply the label using the "More actions" menu and then click "Archive."

Starting today, the buttons and menus at the top of your inbox will look a bit different:

Instead of having to first apply the label and then archive, you can just use the "Move to" button to label and archive in a single step -- just like you would with a folder. If you just want to add or remove a label, use the new "Labels" button. Auto-complete works, so for those of you with a lot of labels, you can select the one you want just by typing the first couple characters.

We're also adding keyboard shortcuts: v for "Move to" and l (lowercase L) for "Labels." Make sure you have keyboard shortcuts turned on to use these.

We're making these changes for everyone over the course of today, so you may not see them right away. But between the shortcuts and auto-complete, you'll soon be able to add and remove labels without touching your mouse.

Official Gmail Blog: Tasks: Paper vs. iPhone

2009-02-02T21:23:00.001-08:00

Posted by Michael Bolin, Tasks engineer

Among the world's leading productivity tools is an advanced technology known as paper. Many of the world's top corporations and most active internet users have adopted paper as a method of organizing their daily lives. When they think of something they need to do, they write it down on a piece of paper and keep that piece of paper with them.

Though some advances have been made in paper's effectiveness -- such as the addition of a sticky section that allows you to attach a piece of paper to your monitor, your desktop, or even another piece of paper -- it turns out that paper is pretty hard to improve on, and reigns as a leading task management technology.

When we set out to build Tasks (now in Gmail Labs), one of our goals was to improve upon paper. With the version of Tasks in Gmail, we focused on making editing very fast and simple -- as close to paper as we could. But despite dual-core CPUs, 30" monitors, and high speed internet connections, many Googlers still found themselves using paper to track their tasks.

We did some competitive analysis and here is what we found.

Paper has a number of popular features:

Easy editing. Cross out with pen and write something new.
Works offline. You can read paper even when your PC is not connected to the internet.
Mobile. Fold paper and stick in pocket.
Instant boot up. Just pull paper out of pocket -- don't have to wait for it to load.

However, paper does have some limitations:

Limited availability. You don't always have a pad of paper with you to write new things.
Not ubiquitous. If you leave a piece of paper in one pair of jeans, you can't access it from the other jeans you're currently wearing.
Difficult to organize. Eventually turns into a giant mess on your desk.

We set out to fix this by making Tasks available from your phone with a version optimized for the small screen. And starting today, you can manage your task list from your iPhone or Android device, and access it from any xhtml enabled phone. (Mine's always with me, in whichever jeans I'm wearing.) Just go to gmail.com/tasks from your phone's browser and log in. If you already use the version of Tasks in Gmail Labs, you'll see the same task list that's always in sync. We focused on making it super easy and fast to update your Gmail task list -- you can add new tasks and check off completed ones, no matter where you are (like in a meeting or at the grocery store) ~~even when you're in the bathroom~~.

A number of Googlers have told us that with this new mobile UI they've finally scrapped the paper task management that they never really liked but couldn't ever beat. We're interested to hear what you think, and how this compares to paper, so try it out and let us know.

P.S. There's a new gadget version of Tasks too -- so if you want to add your same task list to iGoogle, now you can.

Official Gmail Blog: This morning's spam filter issue

2009-01-31T21:12:00.001-08:00

Posted by Brad Taylor, Software Engineer

This morning there was a problem with the implementation of Google's malware filters. Gmail's spam engine uses those filters (among hundreds of other signals) to help protect our users from malware, and so between 6:00 a.m. PST and 8:00 a.m. PST, we mistakenly sent some legitimate mail to people's spam folders.

We're working to roll out an automated fix to put these legitimate messages back into your inboxes, and we expect this to happen within a day. In the meantime, if you were expecting a critical message this morning, please check your spam folder. (We tune our spam filters well enough that ordinarily you should never have to check your spam folder.)

We're very sorry for the inconvenience. We'll update this post as we have more information to share.

Stopping development on Google Notebook

2009-01-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Google Notebook

At Google, we're constantly working to innovate and improve our products so people can easily find and manage information. At times though, we have to decide where to focus our efforts and which technologies we expect will yield the most benefit to users in the long run.

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook/#b=BDT3iIgoQ7sOK5Mcj.

If you haven't used Notebook in the past, we invite you to explore the other Google products that offer Notebook-like functionality. Here are a few examples, all of which are being actively improved and should meet your needs:

SearchWiki - We recently launched a feature on Search that will let you re-rank, comment, and personalize your search results. This is useful when you've found some results on Google Search that were really perfect for your query. You can read about how to use SearchWiki in this blog post.

Google Docs - If you're trying to jot down some quick notes, or create a document that you can share with others, check out Google Docs.

Tasks in Gmail - For a lightweight way to generate a todo list or keep track of things, we recently launched Tasks in Gmail Labs.

Google Bookmarks - For a tool that can help you remember web pages that you liked and access them easily, take a look at Google Bookmarks. You can even add labels to your bookmarks to better organize and revisit them.

While it's hard for us to make this announcement we believe it's the right decision for our users in the long run. And we're excited about all the new ideas we have for Docs, SearchWiki, Bookmarks and other products.

New in Labs: Send & Archive

2009-01-17T20:14:00.001-08:00

Posted by Pal Takacsi, Engineering Manager

In addition to having two cappuccinos, my morning routine includes processing new mail that's arrived in my inbox overnight. More often than not, as I reply to a message I also want to archive it so I can enjoy the satisfaction of a pristine inbox. Having clicked "Send" followed by "Archive" a few million times, I started to wish there was a way to just click once and accomplish both actions at the same time. So I decided to turn this idea to a Gmail Labs experiment. Turn on "Send & Archive" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new button in the compose form labeled just that. The button does what it says: it sends your reply and then archives the thread with one click.

For keyboard shortcut enthusiasts tabbing to this new button works too. In the coming weeks, I'm planning to add undo support, so if you accidentally archived a thread, you can easily get it back into your inbox. Any other requests? Let us know in the Gmail Labs user group.

Google LatLong: Flying Through Google Earth at Macworld

2009-01-12T04:13:00.000-08:00

This year for Macworld I decided to create a program that allows people to "surf" any region on the Earth's surface using a Nintendo Wii Balance Board and the Google Earth API. To do this, I used the Google Earth Browser Plug-in with a Javascript API. The Wii Balance Board transmits the your movements to the Earth Surfer application using Bluetooth and allows you to maneuver a virtual milktruck by shifting your balance as if you were on a surfboard.

Check out the following video to see it in action:

While it's fun to use Earth Surfer, I really wrote it to inspire others to write their own programs. It's all open source using the Apache License, so you can use the code in your own programs, even commercial ones.

It is based on Thatcher Ulrich's terrific Javascript Monster Milktruck demo, which is an open source program on a webpage. I wrapped it as a Macintosh application program so I could add Objective-C. Objective-C uses the Macintosh Bluetooth support to decode the Bluetooth packets from the Wii Balance Board. The Balance Board support is my work. I based that on DarwiinRemote, open source decoders for the Wii Remote.

Earth Surfer and its source code will be available next week on the Google Mac Developer Playground.

Posted by David Phillip Oster, a Google Earth iPhone engineer

YouTube Upload Booth

2009-01-12T03:56:00.000-08:00

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

In addition to the Earth Surfer application, our Macworld booth also features a YouTube Upload Booth this year. Several famed YouTubers stopped in the booth and used Quick Capture to upload their videos to the web. For instance...

Ijustine jumped in the moment she saw it.

Chris Pirillo had some..ahem..difficulties at first but was able to make it work.

And there were many more excited people ready to try it out! Check out the video below to hear more about the YouTube booth:

Blogger Buzz: Blogger in 140 characters or less

2009-01-12T03:48:00.000-08:00

With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that we set up shop on Twitter ourselves. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our Help Center and Blogger Discussion Group remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.

Official Google Docs Blog: Calling all Non-Profits: Share your Docs story for King Day of Service

2009-01-12T03:45:00.000-08:00

Would you like to help spread the word about the importance of community service and supporting your cause? Monday, January 19th is also known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, and to honor this important day, the Google Docs team would like to spotlight not-for-profit organizations who make a difference in their communities.

We are looking for organizations that use Google Docs in some shape or form -- whether it's managing volunteer lists, sharing phone trees, writing grant applications collaboratively or more. If you are willing to share your story about how your organization uses Google Docs, and be featured on this blog, we'd like to hear from you.

For more information or to sign-up, please fill out this form. We look forward to hearing about all about how you use Google Docs in your organization!

Posted by: Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager

Official Google CPG Blog: Do More with Less

2009-01-12T03:39:00.000-08:00

Remember learning about Simple Machines? They are the 6 basic tools that can use leverage to multiple force....lever, pulley, incline plane...remember?

Well, we've pulled a lot of the simple tools Google offers to marketers into one place called domorewithless.

Together these are great tools that are pretty simple to use and can provide you and your brands with powerful information to improve your business. You'll find 15 tools at DoMoreForLess, many of them free, including:

Keyword Tool Insert your site's URL to get a better sense for all the search terms that fit with your website, or input your existing keywords to check out search volume and competition and get ideas for new keywords.

Webmaster Central can help you with your crawling and site indexing questions and driving more traffic to your site.

Google Analytics Our personal favorite freebie! Google Analytics offers a host of fantastic tools to help you figure out where your traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with your site.

Lots of other great tools there. We hope they help you to leverage your marketing muscles to multiply your branding force.

Rich

Posted by Rich Godwin, Head of Industry CPG West

YouTube Blog: Fall in Love in the YouTube Screening Room

2009-01-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day may be a month away, but we're already talking amore in the YouTube Screening Room. For the next two weeks, we're featuring a collection of films that tackles the most ubiquitous of human emotions…love. But don't be fooled: these aren't your grandma's love stories. These films deal with love in all its glory and all its disappointment.

First up, we're proud to present Dan Klores' award-winning feature documentary, Crazy Love, in advance of its television premiere this Saturday at 10pm on The Sundance Channel. Crazy Love explores the true and astonishing story of Burt and Linda Pugach, who married after Burt spent 14 years in prison for his violent and psychologically complex display of affection for Linda.

Along with Klores' documentary, we're featuring 3 outstanding shorts:

In Michelle Lehman's "Marry Me," which won the 2008 Tropfest Festival, a young girl who has a crush on her next door neighbor learns the all-too-truthful lesson that, sometimes, the chase is better than the catch.

In Jonas Bagger's "Dennis," which was an official selection of the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival, a shy bodybuilder finally dares to ask a girl out on a date, resulting in a night he will never forget.

And in Hayley Stuart and Francesca Sophia's "How To Say I Love You," we witness the struggle for intimacy among a generation that has replaced personal interaction with online communication.

This collection of love stories has something for the lovers and the fighters, so we hope all of you enjoy watching.

With love,

Sara P.
YouTube Film

Google Student Blog: Our blogging resolution

2009-01-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

We hope you all enjoyed your holidays, semester breaks, and time off. We have a lot in store for the Google Student Blog in 2009 but we'd also love to hear from you about what you'd like to see in these posts. You can think of it as our New Year blogging resolution. Have a great idea for a post or a series? Is there something you're dying to learn more about? Want to guest write a blog to share how you use Google products on your campus? Share in the comments below or email us at studentspeak@google.com.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and making sure your voices are heard.

The Google Student Blog Team

The Official Google Blog - Cardboard creativity

2009-01-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

Google Open Source team had an offsite in our Chicago office, and we were looking for something fun, social, and geeky for the teams to do during informal discussions. Before that, my colleague Aza had shown me a cool new thing that he was making called Bloxes -- interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They were actually invented by Aza's father, Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project at Apple), and were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles). Having seen some samples of what you could build with them, I thought it would be fun to order a bunch of Bloxes for the team to build things out of while sitting around chatting and brainstorming.

We built a number of interesting things out of the Bloxes that week, but the real fun started after the offsite was over. Several of the Chicago engineers really took to the Bloxes; every week new, fun new sculptures would show up in the lounge. And every week, they would get knocked down (often by the same people who built them up). We decided to match the brown Bloxes with an equal number of white Bloxes, bringing our total to 360. Creativity took it from there -- from a conference room and a giant archway to living room furniture, a pair of giant dice, an office, and much, much more.

Frequently, engineers wind up building something while discussing a bug or a feature, and it's a great conversation starter when other Googlers walk by and see a work in progress. So, what started as a somewhat quiet lounge with a whiteboard quickly became a must-see stop on the office tour for visiting dignitaries, and even better, an ever-changing public space that's fun to construct, and even more fun to knock down.

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering Manager, Chicago

Inside AdSense: Behind the scenes of scheduled maintenance

2009-01-10T07:59:00.002-08:00

We know many of you have questions about what we work on during our monthly scheduled maintenance and how this work affects you. As one of the engineers who's involved with this AdSense maintenance, I'd like to provide some insight into what goes on during these periods.

First, you're probably used to hearing us say that maintenance won't affect your ad serving, and that your earnings will still be tracked as normal. Here's why: when someone visits your site, one of our many ad servers decides which ads we'll show on your pages, and we log the fact that we delivered those ads to your site. We use this information to calculate the number of ad impressions your site visitors generated. Likewise, any clicks on those ads get logged by another of our ad servers. These servers operate independently, so as we roll out upgrades, we can update groups of ad servers without impacting overall ad serving or our internal logs.

Reporting, on the other hand, is quite a different issue, and this is why you aren't able to access your account during maintenance periods. The stats logged by our ad servers aren't immediately reflected in your reports, as they need to be collected and tallied in one place before we can give you a single summary of your ad impressions, clicks, and earnings. Our systems diligently work around-the-clock to collect this data from our many ad servers and tally it all up for each publisher, generally updating the reports with recent stats every 15 to 30 minutes.

Although many of our software upgrades occur throughout the month without any noticeable impact to you, certain types of reporting upgrades just aren't practical to perform on-the-fly. When we perform our monthly maintenance, we have a chance to put this reporting collection on hold for these big upgrades. This lets us upgrade our databases, prepare our systems for new features, and perform the necessary tasks needed to keep a complex system like this one running smoothly.

Some of you have noticed that impression and click stats appear a bit low after we bring the AdSense site back online, wondering if maybe AdSense maintenance is used to change data to affect your earnings. That's a theory I'm happy to debunk: this discrepancy is actually a reporting artifact, occurring because we pause stats tallying during our maintenance period. After resuming, our reporting systems have to digest all of the accumulated impression and click logs, and there's a lot of data! It takes the reporting systems a little while to process the logs, but rest assured that once we get the chance to catch up, the reports will reflect all of the impressions, clicks, and earnings that occurred during the maintenance period. If you're concerned about the stats you're seeing, we recommend checking back throughout the day as your reports are updated.

I hope this explanation provides a better picture of what we're doing during these maintenance periods. Though I do have to work the occasional Saturday, it's worth it to make sure your stats are accurate and everything's working smoothly. (Hey, at least it gives me the chance to sing cheesy 80's pop music in the office to my heart's content without disturbing too many other engineers!)

Posted by Curtis Light - AdSense Software Engineer

Google Chrome Releases--Stable, Beta update: New Gears

2009-01-10T07:59:00.001-08:00

Google Chrome's Stable and Beta channels have been updated to version 1.0.154.43.

This is a minor update to add the following fixes:

Update Gears to version 0.5.8.0 to fix a crash with some offline applications
Enable spell-checking for Hebrew

--Mark Larson, Google Chrome Program Manager

The Official Google Blog - Google's new favicon

2009-01-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. While the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.

Google's new favicon

André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white 'g' on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.

by André Resende

Although we changed the color layout slightly and moved the 'g' off center, his submission formed the basis for our new design.

Incorporating all four of Google's colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) into the four corners of the favicon was a theme we liked in many submissions. We also saw this idea in the designs submitted by Hadi Onur Demirsoy, Lucian E. Marin, and Yusuf Sevgen (pictured below).

by Hadi Onur Demirsoy

by Lucian E. Marin

by Yusuf Sevgen

We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.

While I'm sure we will update it again, we also hope our new favicon inspired by Andre is a warm, colorful beacon to Google on your browser tabs and bookmarks. A big thank you to Andre, Hadi, Lucian, and Yusuf, as well as all of the other people who helped us define our new look in a uniquely user-driven way!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Design Lead

Blogger Buzz: Blogger in 140 characters or less99999

2009-01-10T07:00:00.001-08:00

Google Public Policy Blog: Broadband in the "white spaces" going global?

2009-01-10T03:41:00.000-08:00

Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel

The FCC is taking its work on "white spaces" global. This morning FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the "White Spaces Fellowship and Training Initiative," giving the Commission a new platform to share advice and insights into "white spaces" with international regulators and spectrum experts.

This comes on the heels of the FCC's unanimous vote to open the spectrum to unlicensed use here in the U.S. There are still some important technical hurdles to clear before better and faster wireless Internet connections can be brought to American consumers -- such as a more flexible approach to power levels -- but overall the Commission established the right framework.

Kudos to the Chairman for taking these steps to expand the promise of these airwaves to Internet users worldwide. Google looks forward to supporting the FCC's new initiative as a way to help bring high-speed wireless Internet access to everyone, everywhere.

Google Open Source Blog: The NUI Group's First Google Summer of Code

2009-01-09T04:02:00.000-08:00

By Pawel Solyga, Summer of Code Administrator for the NUI Group

The Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group) is an interactive media group focused on research and creation of open source machine sensing techniques, such as voice/handwriting/gesture recognition and touch computing, to benefit artistic and educational applications. Additionally, the NUI Group is a world wide community offering a collaborative environment for developers that are interested in learning and sharing new Human Computer Interaction methods and concepts. Last year, we were chosen to participate in Google Summer of Code™ 2008 and we worked with 7 students, 6 of whom successfully completed their projects. It was a great opportunity to bring students into the world of Open Source human computer interaction and we were very excited by the results.

Stanislaw Zabramski worked on the multi-physics project. His main goal was to create a multi‐touch sensitive application for two‐dimensional graphic visualizations of a few basic concepts of physics, especially mechanics. His work is meant to be used by primary school pupils as a simple educational entertainment tool, thus making them familiar with physics in a more creative environment. Young users can actively participate in the learning process by designing and testing their own simulations in a visually catchy, cartoon‐style environment. The basic multi-touch enabled prototype application has been developed using Flash and ActionScript, and you can take a closer look at the interface in this screenshot:

We are looking forward to Stanislaw's release of the final version later this year.

Ashish Kumar Rai wrote a QMTSim application, a multi-touch input Tangible User Interface Object (TUIO) Simulator. Ashish developed this new simulator to allow fast development and debugging of multi-touch applications. TUIO is a versatile protocol, designed specifically to meet the requirements of table-top tangible user interfaces. While there is a Java based TUIO simulator, it does not help in utilizing the full capabilities of the protocol and only rudimentary applications can be developed using it. Ashish's implementation of QMTSim has many advantages over the Java TUIO simulator, including things like user defined touch point movement paths, an animation timeline, and support for simulations of pinching and zooming. Further, QMTSim provides opacity control to make the simulator transparent and to keep it above the application, thus giving an impression of touching the application itself. Ashish has recorded three videos on his project, including an introduction and two screencasts.

Alessandro De Nardi worked on the Grafiti project, a general infrastructure for table-top application multi-touch and multi-user gesture recognition management. Grafiti is a C# framework built on top of the C# TUIO client designed to support the use of third party modules for specialized gesture recognition algorithms. A set of modules for the recognition of some basic gestures is included. You may want to check out Alessandro's demo video:

Thomas Hansen developed Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) accelerated blob tracking for multi-touch user interfaces (and other blob tracking needs for that matter) as part of his gpuTracker project. Video signals are processed by the GPU to provide real time tracking of blobs. gpuTracker is aimed specifically at tracking blobs such as those created by displays using Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) or Diffused Illumination (DI). Check out the image of video input from a GPU enabled blob tracker:

Seth Sandler worked on the tbeta project, a blob tracking application for multi-touch screens built using image processing based techniques like FTIR and DI. The application is written in C++ and uses OpenFrameworks. Some of the most interesting features include an input video image filter chain, a quick camera switcher, dynamic mesh calibration for fish eye lenses, image reflection, a GPU mode, which allows for integration with the aforementioned gpuTracker code that was developed by Thomas Hansen. Most importantly, tbeta is cross-platform and already works on Mac, Linux and Windows.

Daniel Lelis Baggio wrote EHCI (Enhanced Human Computer Interface), a webcam image processing library built on top of OpenCV, which generates events from user's head, hand and body movements. This library is also intended to track objects so that augmented reality can be made. In order to enhance human computer interaction, the application uses a single webcam and does not require the use of either FTIR or DI techniques. Besides tracking positions, this library is also able to provide higher level events such as fetching 3d user hand or head position. You can get a better feeling of Daniel's work by watching his EHCI videos on youtube.

Many congratulations to our students and many thanks to our mentors for making our first Summer of Code such a wonderful experience

Flex + the Embedded Player: A Christmas Story

2009-01-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Hey YouTube folks! My name is Pamela Fox, and I hail from the Maps API world. I was charged with the task this year of creating the map for the NORAD Santa Tracker (yes, Google even indexes Santa), and I decided to convert last year's JavaScript map into a Flex map. This meant converting every feature into Flex, including arguably the most important feature: displaying YouTube-hosted Santa Cam videos in the infowindows. The kiddies get a kick out of seeing Santa soaring, tumbling, and freewheeling through the endless diamond sky.

I wanted what I thought was a basic feature: using the embedded player to play 23 different YouTube videos in the same Flex app. I started with a straightforward implementation - using the SWFLoader Flex component with the source set to the URL of the YouTube video. But I noticed some funny behavior - the first video would load, but none after that. After some searching around, I discovered the reason for this: if the first loaded YouTube SWF isn't properly removed by calling its destroy method(), any subsequently loaded YouTube SWF won't play correctly. The solution is to call destroy() on the YouTube SWF - but wait a second, it's not that easy. Flex/AS3 SWFs cannot call methods on AS2 SWFs, and YouTube SWFs are indeed written in AS2.

After harassing various YouTube engineers and reading through the AS3 Chromeless Player wrapper code, I came up with the solution shown in the diagram below.

The Flex app uses SWFLoader to load in an AS2 SWF, which I call the "YouTube bridge". The YouTube bridge creates a LocalConnection, which is a way for any SWF to invoke methods on any other SWF that's open simultaneously on a computer. The bridge specifies what connection it can receive commands from, and then defines two functions that other SWFs can call - loadMovie() and dispose(). The loadMovie() function takes in a YouTube ID, creates a MovieClip and loads the YouTube movie into it. The dispose() function calls destroy() on that MovieClip, and then does various other cleanup operations. The Flex app then tells that same connection what method names it wants to invoke, either "loadMovie" or "dispose". Some snippets of the LocalConnection code are shown below:


// Flex
outBox = new LocalConnection();
outBox.send(outBoxName, "dispose");
outBox.send(outBoxName, "loadMovie", ids[counter]);

// AS2
var inbox = new LocalConnection();
inbox.connect(_root.boxName);
inbox.dispose = function () {
  youtubeMC.destroy();
  ...
};

When I first coded this, I hard-coded a name for the connection name in the Flex + AS2. This meant that my app couldn't be used in multiple browsers at the same time, since all instances of the app would be sending and receiving messages from the same inbox, and they'd get awfully confused. To remedy that, I generate a random ID in the Flex app, pass that into the query string when loading the YouTube bridge, and then have the bridge use the value of the query parameter as the inbox name. A snippet of that code is shown below:


// Flex
outBoxName = String(new Date().getUTCMilliseconds());
swfLoader.load("youtubebridge.swf?boxName=" + outBoxName);

// AS2
inbox.connect(_root.boxName);

The full code (MXML + FLA) is available, and you can test out the demo app. Now that I've made it easy for you all, I hope to see some nifty YouTube/Flex mashups.. and maybe even some Youtube/Flex/Maps mashups!

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube API Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Tracking Santa: the backstory
forGoogle Image Search
Black Googlers work:buildingmmunity
Black Googlers

Our Inside AdSense resolution

2009-01-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

Here on the AdSense blog, we usually kick off each new year with a list of suggested AdSense resolutions for publishers. Although we still think using more 300x250 medium rectangles and setting up ad placements make great goals for the year, we'd like to change things up this time and share our resolutions with you.

In 2009, we resolve to continue improving the blog based on your needs and suggestions. We heard positive feedback and saw increases in readership last year in response to our themed campaigns, videos, and easier navigation to important posts. Beyond that, we want to continue looking for ways to ensure that this blog is a useful resource for you, whether you're looking for new feature releases or oldie-but-goodie optimization tips.

We also resolve to bring you more information from our team in new ways. In the new year, you'll hear more from the Product Managers who develop the AdSense features you use, and specialists on the AdSense team who will share their expertise with you. We've heard from many publishers that they want clearer, more transparent communication from our team, and we resolve to provide as much information as we can to address your questions and concerns.

Do you have suggestions for improving the blog, or types of content you'd like to see more of? We're all ears, so please feel free to leave us a comment below. It's a brand new year, and we're ready to get started!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

[NFGB] Link - from Inside AdSense
Related From Google Blogs:
Year in review: 2008
Warm wishes
Light up your site
Western Union payment updates

The Official Google Blog - Google at Macworld

2009-01-08T06:32:00.000-08:00

After months of anticipation, Macworld 2009 is finally here. Throughout the four days of the expo (from now until Jan. 9), more than 100 Googlers from several product teams will be available to demonstrate Google software for the Mac and the iPhone.

Picasa for Mac made its debut yesterday, and you can follow along on the Google Mac Blog for more details on what we have in store for the rest of the week.

If you're going to Macworld, we invite you to stop by. And for those of you who can't make it, many of the demos are available via video at google.com/macworld.

Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

[NFGB] Link - from The Official Google Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Cardboard creativity
Introducing Picasa for Mac (at Macworld!)
Google blogging in 2008
A grateful season

Google Testing Blog: Interfacing with hard-to-test third-party code

2009-01-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

by Miško Hevery

Shahar asks an excellent question about how to deal with frameworks which we use in our projects, but which were not written with testability in mind.

Hi Misko, First I would like to thank you for the "Guide to Writing Testable Code", which really helped me to think about better ways to organize my code and architecture. Trying to apply the guide to the code I'm working on, I came up with some difficulties. Our code is based on external frameworks and libraries. Being dependent on external frameworks makes it harder to write tests, since test setup is much more complex. It's not just a single class we're using, but rather a whole bunch of classes, base classes, definitions and configuration files. Can you provide some tips about using external libraries or frameworks, in a manner that will allow easy testing of the code?
-- Thanks, Shahar

There are two different kind of situations you can get yourself into:

Either your code calls a third-party library (such as you calling into LDAP authentication, or JDBC driver)

Or a third party library calls you and forces you to implement an interface or extend a base class (such as when using servlets).

Unless these APIs are written with testability in mind, they will hamper your ability to write tests.

Calling Third-Party Libraries

I always try to separate myself from third party library with a Facade and an Adapter. Facade is an interface which has a simplified view of the third-party API. Let me give you an example. Have a look at javax.naming.ldap. It is a collection of several interfaces and classes, with a complex way in which you have to call them. If your code depends on this interface you will drown in mocking hell. Now I don't know why the API is so complex, but I do know that my application only needs a fraction of these calls. I also know that many of these calls are configuration specific and outside of bootstrapping code these APIs are cluttering what I have to mock out.

I start from the other end. I ask myself this question. 'What would an ideal API look like for my application?' The key here is 'my application' An application which only needs to authenticate will have a very different 'ideal API' than an application which needs to manage the LDAP. Because we are focusing on our application the resulting API is significantly simplified. It is very possible that for most applications the ideal interface may be something along these lines.

interface Authenticator {
 boolean authenticate(String username,
                      String password);
}

As you can see this interface is a lot simpler to mock and work with than the original one as a result it is a lot more testable. In essence the ideal interfaces are what separates the testable world from the legacy world.

Once we have an ideal interface all we have to do is implement the adapter which bridges our ideal interface with the actual one. This adapter may be a pain to test, but at least the pain is in a single location.

The benefit of this is that:

We can easily implement an InMemoryAuthenticator for running our application in the QA environment.

If the third-party APIs change than those changes only affect our adapter code.

If we now have to authenticate against a Kerberos or Windows registry the implementation is straight forward.

We are less likely to introduce a usage bug since calling the ideal API is simpler than calling the original API.

Plugging into an Existing Framework

Let's take servlets as an example of hard to test framework. Why are servlets hard to test?

Servlets require a no argument constructor which prevents us from using dependency injection. See how to think about the new operator.

Servlets pass around HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse which are very hard to instantiate or mock.

At a high level I use the same strategy of separating myself from the servlet APIs. I implement my actions in a separate class

class LoginPage {
 Authenticator authenticator;
 boolean success;
 String errorMessage;
 LoginPage(Authenticator authenticator) {
   this.authenticator = authenticator;
 }

 String execute(Map<String, String> parameters,
                String cookie) {
   // do some work
   success = ...;
   errorMessage = ...;
 }

 String render(Writer writer) {
   if (success)
     return "redirect URL";
   else
     writer.write(...);
 }
}

The code above is easy to test because:

It does not inherit from any base class.

Dependency injection allows us to inject mock authenticator (Unlike the no argument constructor in servlets).

The work phase is separated from the rendering phase. It is really hard to assert anything useful on the Writer but we can assert on the state of the LoginPage, such as success and errorMessage.

The input parameters to the LoginPage are very easy to instantiate. (Map<String, String>, String for cookie, or a StringWriter for the writer).

What we have achieved is that all of our application logic is in the LoginPage and all of the untestable mess is in the LoginServlet which acts like an adapter. We can than test the LoginPage in depth. The LoginSevlet is not so simple, and in most cases I just don't bother testing it since there can only be wiring bug in that code. There should be no application logic in the LoginServlet since we have moved all of the application logic to LoginPage.

Let's look at the adapter class:

class LoginServlet extends HttpServlet {
 Provider<LoginPage> loginPageProvider;

 // no arg constructor required by
 // Servlet Framework
 LoginServlet() {
   this(Global.injector
          .getProvider(LoginPage.class));
 }

 // Dependency injected constructor used for testing
 LoginServlet(Provider<LoginPage> loginPageProvider) {
   this.loginPageProvider = loginPageProvider;
 }

 service(HttpServletRequest req,
         HttpServletResponse resp) {
   LoginPage page = loginPageProvider.get();
   page.execute(req.getParameterMap(),
        req.getCookies());
   String redirect = page.render(resp.getWriter())
   if (redirect != null)
     resp.sendRedirect(redirect);
 }
}

Notice the use of two constructors. One fully dependency injected and the other no argument. If I write a test I will use the dependency injected constructor which will than allow me to mock out all of my dependencies.

Also notice that the no argument constructor is forcing me to use global state, which is very bad, but in the case of servlets I have no choice. However, I make sure that only servlets access the global state and the rest of my application is unaware of this global variable and uses proper dependency injection techniques.

BTW there are many frameworks out there which sit on top of servlets and which provide you a very testable APIs. They all achieve this by separating you from the servlet implementation and from HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse. For example Waffle and WebWork

[NFGB] Link - from Google Testing Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Static Methods are Death to Testability
GTAC Videos and Slides Available
TotT: Mockers of the (C++) World, Delight!
Announcing Google C++ Mocking Framework

Announcing Picasa for Mac

2009-01-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

Given that Picasa originally began as Windows PC software, you might be surprised at how many Macs you'll find floating around our Santa Monica office (which is where Google's photos-related work mostly takes place). Of course, Picasa Web Albums, our online photo-sharing site, is browser-based, and used by millions of Mac folks every day, so much of what we do is platform-independent.

Still, what makes Picasa Web Albums really shine has always been its special integration with Picasa software on your home computer. Picasa and Picasa Web Albums work together to let you do things like automatically sync photos between your computer and the web, quickly download entire original-resolution photo albums from friends and family with a click, and so on.

We're therefore excited to announce that we're bringing the full version of Picasa to Mac OS X. Like its Windows and Linux counterparts, Picasa for Mac is a standalone program that helps you organize photos anywhere on your hard disk, edit your photos to perfection, and then easily share them online.

Picasa for Mac looks and works almost exactly like Picasa on other platforms. It can keep track of photo files scattered across your hard drives, and will automatically account for new photos as you add them to your system. Picasa for Mac also features non-destructive editing, so you can explore different photo adjustments and effects without worry.

In building Picasa for Mac, we've tried to make sure it "plays nice" with iPhoto. Picasa takes a special read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so your iPhoto library isn't ever affected when you use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums plugin for iPhoto can of course continue to do so, though features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more are only available in the Picasa application. Take a look:

As you'll notice on the download page, Picasa for Mac is initially being released as a Google Labs product -- it's very much a beta. Some smaller features like geotagging and 3rd-party printing aren't functional, yet, and you may well stumble across other rough edges as you use this beta. Please let us know how Picasa works on your Mac, and what you'd like to see -- if you're at Macworld this week, come talk to the Picasa engineers in person. We'll be giving demos of Picasa at the Google booth throughout Macworld's run, and very much want to hear from our users.

Sound good? Head over to the download page, and give it a spin!

[NFGB] Link - from Google Photos Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Picasa 3.1 & name tags localized in 38 languages
Improved sharing, international name tags, and more
Picasa 3 -- fresh out of beta!
Picasa -- it's not just for photos, anymore!

Picasa's Macworld Debut

2009-01-06T05:22:00.000-08:00

By Stuart Morgan, Software Engineer

Last year we had a blast at Macworld demonstrating all our Mac products, but as Mac users, we also know that the best part of Macworld is new product announcements. This year, we're getting in the spirit by making a little announcement of our own: we're happy to say that Picasa, Google's photo management software, will be joining the ranks of the free Mac OS X applications from Google!

If you've never tried Picasa before, it's a program that helps you manage, edit, and share your photo collection. It works especially well with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, so it can help you manage the photo albums you've shared online with friends and family as well as the photos on your computer. In addition to photo editing tools, the Picasa client includes features like automatic web sync, fast and simple sharing, collage making, and simple movie editing. And on the web side, Picasa Web Albums offers unique features like name tags, which help you automatically organize your photo collection based on the faces in each picture.

You'll notice that Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs and has a "beta" label attached—a few minor features like geotagging and webcam capture aren't functional yet, and we plan to sand and polish some parts of the user interface to make sure Picasa feels right at home on Mac OS X. Still, we think you'll find plenty to like in this first beta, and we're excited to get this release out into the hands of the Mac community at this year's Macworld! We're looking forward to making Picasa for the Mac even better, and to hearing what you think — Picasa engineers will be at the Google booth's demo stations throughout Macworld, and we always listen to the feedback on our Help Forum.

There's plenty more to say about Picasa on the Mac, so check out the video below, swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more and download a copy to play with—and of course, come see us at Macworld!

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mac Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
One Week Until Macworld
Google at Macworld Expo
Bringing Your Photos Home
Google Earth Browser Plugin

GAAC Attack: Year-End Fun for Google Analytics Pros

2009-01-06T04:59:00.001-08:00

2008 was an amazing year for the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs). These guys are experts with Google Analytics, providing excellent service in areas such as installation, consultation and training. They're located all across the US, which means you can probably find one near you.

We really like hearing from GAACs because they eat, live and breathe GA every day. Once a year, we invite them to Google for an event called the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant Summit (GAAWOACS for short... just kidding). This past December over 200 participants from more than 30 countries attended. Vince Cerf keynoted and we had four days full of product information on Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Urchin delivered by our Product Management team, plus case studies, networking and oh yeah.. lots of food and drinks.

We're not sure who looks forward to it more, the Authorized Consultants or us, but it's clear something's going right when a participant produces a rap about the event! Cheers to Paul Chastain from Just1 a Google Analytics Authorized Consulting company out of Idaho.

Here is the rap. I promised him glory since we're all out of T-shirts. Hope to see more like this next year!

Posted by Eva Woo, Google Analytics Team

[NFGB] Link - from Google Analytics Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Analytics, AdWords, and Big Spenders
L'introduction d'un nouvel ami: the Google Analytics blog in French
New and improved account management pages
Google Analytics YouTube Channel

Can I use this Intent?

2009-01-06T04:59:00.000-08:00

Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensively to create shortcuts for instance. While it is nice to be able to make use of a loosely coupled API, there is no guarantee that the intent you send will be received by another application. This happens in particular with 3rd party apps, like Panoramio and its RADAR intent.

While working on a new application, I came up with a very simple way to find out whether the system contains any application capable of responding to the intent you want to use. I implemented this technique in my application to gray out the menu item that the user would normally click to trigger the intent. The code is pretty simple and easy to follow:

 /**  * Indicates whether the specified action can be used as an intent. This  * method queries the package manager for installed packages that can  * respond to an intent with the specified action. If no suitable package is  * found, this method returns false.  *  * @param context The application's environment.  * @param action The Intent action to check for availability.  *  * @return True if an Intent with the specified action can be sent and  *         responded to, false otherwise.  */ public static boolean isIntentAvailable(Context context, String action) {     final PackageManager packageManager = context.getPackageManager();     final Intent intent = new Intent(action);     List<ResolveInfo> list =             packageManager.queryIntentActivities(intent,                     PackageManager.MATCH_DEFAULT_ONLY);     return list.size() > 0; }

Here is how I use it:

 @Override public boolean onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {     final boolean scanAvailable = isIntentAvailable(this,         "com.google.zxing.client.android.SCAN");      MenuItem item;     item = menu.findItem(R.id.menu_item_add);     item.setEnabled(scanAvailable);      return super.onPrepareOptionsMenu(menu); }

In this example, the menu is grayed out if the Barcode Scanner application is not installed. Another, simpler, way to do this is to catch the ActivityNotFoundException when calling startActivity() but it only lets you react to the problem, you cannot predict it and update the UI accordingly to prevent the user from doing something that won't work. The technique described here can also be used at startup time to ask the user whether he'd like to install the missing package, you can then simply redirect him to the Android Market by using the appropriate URI.

Note: this article was originally posted on my personal blog.

[NFGB] Link - from Android Developers Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Can I use this Intent?
New Resources for Developers
Touch Mode
Behind the apps: Amazed

Start the year with learning: Two upcoming webinars

2009-01-06T04:57:00.000-08:00

Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed the holidays. To start 2009 off right, we'd like to offer you two webinars: Shaping the Heart of Your Marketing Strategy: Valentine's Day 2009 from the AdWords Retail team and Travel Shopping in Today's Economy from the AdWords Travel team. You can read more about each webinar and sign up below.

Shaping the Heart of Your Marketing Strategy: Valentine's Day 2009 Webinar
Wednesday, January 7th at 10 AM PST - Register to attend

As we wrap up the holidays, it's time to plan ahead for the new year and adapt your business strategy for upcoming opportunities and challenges. In this webinar, we will discuss strategies retailers can take to get the most out of this Valentine's Day. Join the Google Retail team and the Google Tech team on Wednesday, January 7th at 10 AM PST to learn about these topics:

Understanding retail trends to reach consumers in today's landscape
Building effective Valentine's Day ads using new Google tools
Planning ahead based on online campaign performance trends
Tips and tricks for optimizing your search campaigns

This webinar will run approximately 30 minutes, followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. Register here.

Travel Shopping in Today's Economy, presented by Compete and Google

Wednesday, January 14th at 11:00 am PST - Register to attend

As the economy has slowed, having an up-to-date perspective on consumer travel demand and preferences is more important than ever. Using an in-depth survey of traveler perspectives and a detailed online behavioral analysis, Google and Compete have partnered to create a new study exploring how consumers are shopping for travel in today's economy.

Join us on Wednesday, January 14th at 11:00 AM PST to learn:

How the volume of travel research and booking activity changed as the economy has weakened
How consumers are shopping for travel differently now than they have in the past, and what implications this has for travel marketers
Consumer outlook on their plans for travel in the future and how travel sellers can take advantage of this

This webinar will run approximately 45 minutes, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Register here.

We hope these webinars help you get the most out of your 2009 campaigns.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

[NFGB] Link - from Inside AdWords
Related From Google Blogs:
Our Top 10 for 2008
AdWords Editor 7.0 for Windows and Mac
Quick tip: Use keyword matching options with negative keywords
(Ad)Word of the Day: Optimization

Google blogging in 2008

2009-01-06T04:51:00.000-08:00

Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.

This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.

We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?

But it wasn't all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google's 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people's lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.

Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.

Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools' Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.

And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs. A few highlights: eight new developer blogs (the Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian; and AdWords blogs in Danish, German, Turkish, French, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Spanish). There's even an Analytics blog in French. And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India, Africa, and the Ukraine. Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.

We're looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.

Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team

[NFGB] Link - from Traditional Media: Let's Take it Offline
Related From Google Blogs:
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Year in review: 2008

2009-01-06T04:42:00.001-08:00

As 2008 winds down, we'd like to follow tradition and close out the year with a look back at a few of the biggest happenings in AdSense.

In 2008, we introduced new features like AdSense for feeds and an improved version of AdSense for search to help you generate additional forms of revenue. We brought Google Ad Manager out of beta to help publishers with smaller direct sales teams more efficiently sell, schedule, and deliver their ad inventory. At the same time, we worked towards providing more information within AdSense accounts. In April, we enabled the Ad Review Center in all accounts to help you review ads placement-targeted to your sites. And in response to requests for more insight into your reports, we launched link unit reporting and began inviting publishers to link their AdSense accounts with Analytics.

Internationally, we launched AdSense for content in Thai and also expanded Western Union payments to a number of new countries such as Egypt, Taiwan, and Panama. To help more publishers find answers to their questions, we launched AdSense Help Forums in Hebrew, Czech, and Slovak.

On the English Help Forum, we celebrated our 50,000th member and then unveiled a new platform with additional capabilities. Now, forum participants can vote on the best answer to their questions, subscribe to individual discussions, and receive replies to their threads via email.

In news closest to home here on the blog, the Inside AdSense family continued to grow with the launch of blogs in Russian and Traditional Chinese. With your support, our 13 global AdSense blogs received 3.8 million pageviews from 2.4 million visits this year. Through our blogs, we brought you a Newbie Fridays series, 'Optimisation Essentials' videos from our Australian team, and began distributing AdSense stickers. Check out the sticker requests, postcards, and notes we received in the photo on the right :)

Last but not least, the 2008 Reader's Choice Award for this year's most visited post goes to our April Fool's joke, 'Introducing AdSense for conversations'. Co-author Julie Beckmann had this to say: "A lot of hard work went into omega testing the product for this post. While I found the hat fit snugly, I was disappointed to learn the effect my Orange County upbringing had on my chats -- 17 'like's' sprinkled into a two-minute conversation? My chats aren't fit to be placement-targeted."

Thanks for helping to contribute to an eventful 2008 -- we're looking forward to an even more exciting 2009. Happy New Year!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mobile Blog
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Track Santa with Google Maps for mobile!
Google blogging in 2008
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Google Earth: now you CAN take it with you

2009-01-06T04:39:00.003-08:00

When Lionel Barrymore ("Grandpa Martin Vanderhof") told Jimmy Stewart ("Tony Kirby") "You Can't Take it With You," he clearly wasn't talking about Google Earth Enterprise.

Starting immediately, you can take Google Earth Enterprise with you, thanks to a new portable version – an extension to the technology behind programs like Virtual Alabama, below, and the US Forest Service's Automated Flight Following .

Google Earth Enterprise lets customers build globes with their own data that can be accessed with the same fast, easy-to-use technology as Google Earth. Previously, Google Earth Enterprise customers could only access their private Google Earth globes when connected to the network. Sometimes, when working in the field, limited or no network connectivity prevented our customers from accessing the full potential of the geospatial data.

The portable version of Google Earth Enterprise allows organizations to distribute geospatial data to their employees where bandwidth is limited or unavailable – such as emergency workers responding to a disaster. Customers can deploy the portable solution for a single individual, or for a multi-person team.

This version is also appropriate for situations when users are away from their desks and need to access an organization's geospatial data. Data collected in the field can also be transferred to the primary system when network connectivity is available.

We're always listening and working to improve our products, and we look forward to hearing about the new and innovative uses you find for this technology.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise Team

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Enterprise Blog
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Building a bridge in Google Earth

2009-01-06T04:30:00.000-08:00

More than 250,000 vehicles a day zip past the largest construction project in California history. That project – the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge – is now on Google Earth, the first time a construction project has been featured. You'll be able to do things on Google Earth's Bay Bridge that would get you arrested in real life – like climbing to the top of the Self-Anchored Suspension Span's single tower, which offers breathtaking views of the Bay Area. To view the model, turn on the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth.

The bridge is scheduled to be completed in 2013, so visitors are getting a sneak peak of this new Bay Area landmark. The solid sections of the bridge are already complete, while the transparent sections are under construction, and we will continue to update the model as the construction progresses. Now you can be among the first to "drive" across the new bridge and see a world class icon come to life.

Posted by Bart Ney, Public Information Officer, California Department of Transportatiaon

[NFGB] Link - from Google LatLong
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Ring in the New Year with Bells and Whistles

2009-01-06T04:29:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

One evening in Zurich, after a late night cake run, we decided that our iPhone app, Google Mobile App with Voice Search, could do with a little bling. The result of this is a few extra options hidden below the preferences on the Settings tab. Trust us, they're down there... it just might take some perseverance to get to the bottom of things. Just keep trying!

Does blue not go with your new belt? Use the Theme Color to style the app to work with any outfit or match the holiday season.

Tired of the standard beeps and boops during speech recognition? You can try out some alternate sounds made by our teammates in their sugar-induced stupor.

There are a couple of other options hidden in there, too. We had (a little too much) fun implementing these features and hope you enjoy them!

And don't worry. If you don't find them, just come see us at Macworld and we'll show you.

Posted by Nicholas Jitkoff, User Experience Designer

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mobile Blog
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Vote for new Google mobile product features

2009-01-06T04:20:00.000-08:00

Have you ever left a comment on the Google mobile blog about a new feature or platform that you really wanted supported? Have you ever wanted to cast a vote for another reader's comment to make your opinion heard? Well now you can.

While we do read your comments on the mobile blog and help forum, we're happy to announce our new Product Ideas page that will give you a more collaborative way to get your product ideas heard not only by us, but by others as well. The new page, built on Google Moderator, allows you to submit ideas that others can view and rate so you can see what other Google mobile users think about it, too. This way some ideas will be voted up and others will be voted down.

From this we'll be able to see more clearly what's important to you and we'll take it into consideration as we move forward with developing our products. The Product Ideas team will pop in from time to time to see what you have to say, and we'll be offering periodic updates on what we see and what ideas make it into your favorite products in our Product Ideas blog.

To get started, visit the Product Ideas for Google mobile page and sign in, then let your voice heard!

Posted by Beverly, Ethan, Courtney, Sze-Jun, Product Ideas Team

Rewind: Google TV Ads in 2008

2009-01-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

While you are deciding on your New Year's resolutions and preparing for an exciting 2009, the Google TV Ads team would like to thank you for tuning in and reading our posts. Here's a look back at our favorite product enhancements of 2008.

Expanded reach
We announced partnerships with NBC Universal, Bloomberg TV, and the Hallmark Channel, all in our mission to grow our inventory so that advertisers can leverage the benefits of Google TV Ads to reach up to 94 million households. Bloomberg TV network inventory became available in Q4, and eight more networks will be available in early 2009.

Paving the way for additional future inventory partnerships, our partnership with Harris Corporation will enable media companies to more easily make their inventory available to Google TV Ads advertisers through Harris' current traffic systems' inventory tools. Our inventory providers will find it easier to manage their media sales through our platform within the existing Harris system.

The right audience
Making ad spend more efficient is about airing an advertiser's message to the audience that finds it most relevant. Program Targeting was enhanced to provide advertisers with "Broad Match" results that not only match the keywords you entered into the search field, but also TV programs related to the keywords. With this enhancement you can discover and target even more programming content that is relevant to your business. We also had a beta launch of Demographic Search, where advertisers select the audience attributes they value most, and are then presented with a list of networks and programs whose viewership includes a high concentration of the ad campaign's intended audience.

Data to help you optimize for improved ROI
Lastly, we added a few features to help advertisers fine-tune their campaigns for an improved return on investment. Nielsen viewership demographic data is available in Report Center for each ad airing in a campaign. With this data, advertisers can get directional feedback on whether their ads are reaching the desired demographic, and then adjust their campaign targets accordingly. Report Center also has new Reach and Frequency reports to provide insight into how often viewers see an ad, helping determine whether the campaign is delivering on goal.

Better campaign planning tools
Some of the feature updates we implemented this past year will help advertisers by improving the campaign creation process. Our Traffic Estimator got a new look and enhanced functionality, while still providing estimated impression counts for each target network/daypart and program, based on budget and bid. And the new Flight Controls feature allows advertisers to schedule in advance when they'd like to pause their campaigns, saving time when managing their campaigns.
Easier campaign management
We like keeping things simple, but useful. This year we added some tools to accomplish just that. To help save you time when creating a new TV campaign, we launched a new feature that allows advertisers to copy your targeting settings from a previous campaign to a new campaign. We also created the Ads Diagnostic Tool to quickly provide details on why an uploaded ad may not be ready to air.

As 2008 comes to a close, we are already working hard to bring your more exciting developments in Google TV Ads for next year. Stay tuned...

Posted by Aly Makishima for Google TV Ads

[NFGB] Link - from Traditional Media: Let's Take it Offline
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Prizes for Panchayats– using orkut to reward grassroots innovation

2009-01-04T04:23:00.000-08:00

We here at Google.org are excited to announce a contest that we hope many of you orkuteers are able to get involved in: the Google.org Gram Panchayat Puraskar (GGPP). For those of you who don't already know, Panchayats were Mahatma Gandhi's original vision for a free India – an India made up of thousands of "little Republics" where people meet their needs through self-reliance. Today, panchayats are responsible for implementing development programs. They often create positive change at the grassroots level, but we think that their success stories aren't always as well known as they should be.

To help celebrate innovative panchayats and encourage more innovation in local governance throughout India, we've created the first Google.org Gram Panchayat Puraskar (GGPP). We'll reward the top five panchayats in two states, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, with a cash prize of Rs.5 lakhs (approximately $10,000 USD) which they can use to do more good in their communities.

The prize will be awarded in one of six areas: education, health and nutrition, water supply, rural infrastructure, rural electrification, and resource mobilization. The winning payanchat must include a wide variety of social and income groups, share information with villagers, respond to citizen feedback, and track the quality of programs.

Think your gram panchayat has what it takes to win? Sign up for the contest now and tell us why! To enter, you can either visit the contest website at www.google.org/ggpp.html, or pick-up an application at your district or block panchayat office in Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh. The contest is only open for applications through January 25, 2009 though, so don't waste any time!

Wanna learn more? Be sure to check out the official GGPP page that we've created for this contest, and of course join the GGPP orkut community. With our orkut community, you can ask questions, read related news, and most importantly, get to know other people interested in fostering social change in their local region.

Check out what Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the Union Minister of Panchayat Raj had to say about the competition:

Hope to see you on orkut and hear about all of the great innovations that your panchayats have come up with soon!

Posted by Salimah Samji, Program Manager, Inform & Empower and Meryl Stone, Senior Associate, Inform & Empower, Google.org.

[NFGB] Link - from orkut Blog
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2008: The Year In Video

2009-01-04T04:17:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy and exciting year here at YouTube. With 13 hours of video uploaded every minute, hundreds of millions of views a day and 23 country-specific versions of the site, apart from anything else we were faced by a mountain content to sift through and myriad factors to bear in mind when compiling our end-of-year list of memorable moments. Which is why we turned to our estimable team of statisticians to help formulate the selection – if only to avoid unseemly bust-ups around the office.

With the help of our all-powerful analytics tool, the aim was to balance the raw power of heavy video views with a subtle blend of community engagement metrics including ratings, favorites and the ability to stir up a comments storm. The net result was a cluster of memorable video moments which this year we have whittled down to 24 and will reveal at the rate of one an hour until 2009 dawns and the whole process can begin in earnest again. Until then, revel in the videos that made the cut last year:

At the stroke of midnight (Pacific Time) you can expect a more detailed run-down of the clips on the list complete with some background information to place them in context. Until then, it would spoil the surprise to breathe a word of the videos to come. So sit back, enjoy your New Year's Eve and prepare yourself for a jog through the most memorable YouTube moments of 2008.

Have fun,
The YouTube Team

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube BlogRelated From Google Blogs:
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Our 100th post -- What about MY phone?

2009-01-04T03:52:00.000-08:00

We don't always say this, but thank you for reading the Google mobile blog.

When we launched last year, we realized that we needed to better communicate what the Google mobile team was up to. Since then, we've been working hard to provide you with timely and useful information. We've also sought to keep our posts personal and engaging by introducing you to the Googlers behind our products, incorporating video, and enabling comments.

While we're thrilled that our readership has continued to grow, we want to make the mobile blog even more useful and interesting to you in 2009. We invite you to tell us how we can improve. What else do you want to see on the mobile blog? Are our posts too long or too short? What phones do you most want to read about? Please fill out this quick survey to let us know what you think.

In celebration of our 100th post, we're going to attempt to address one of the blog's most frequent comments: "What about MY phone?" This comment always seems to be tinged with such angst and passion. Trust us, as users we know your pain. But we also know the difficulty of developing software for disparate phones.

We've put together a video that gives you a behind-the-scenes glimpse of our "Sky Lab" that contains over 800 phones for developing, demonstrating, and testing purposes. Although we have so many phones, we currently can't make all of our products work on all of these phones -- we face the same challenges that every developer faces in the mobile industry: we have to choose. So this video also reveals two very different approaches for choosing devices in this industry... If you have any better ideas, let us know!

Of course, if you've been following our blog you may have noticed some patterns. We do like phones with good browsers and flat-rate data plans. Stay tuned to the Google mobile blog for more on this in the new year.

Posted by Lawrence Chang, Product Marketing Manager, Google mobile team

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mobile Blog
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Translation is Risky Business

2009-01-04T03:41:00.000-08:00

Posted by Shankar Kumar and Wolfgang Macherey

At Google, we like search. So it's no surprise that we treat language translation as a search problem. We build statistical models of how one language maps to another (the translation model) and models of what the target language is supposed to look like (the language model) and then we search for the best translation according to those models (combined into one big log linear model for those of you taking notes).

But, just as putting all of your money in the investment with the highest historical return is not always the best idea, choosing the translation with the highest probability is not always the best idea either - especially when you have a relatively flat distribution among the top candidates. Instead, we can use the Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) criterion. Essentially, we look at a sample of the best candidate translations (the so called n-best list) and choose the safest one, the one most likely to do the least amount of damage (where 'damage' is defined by our measurement of translation quality). You might want to view this as choosing a translation that is a lot like the other good translations instead of choosing that strange one that had the good model score.

If this is our 'diversification' strategy, how can we make things even safer? Exactly the same way as we do for investments, we diversify even more. That is, we look at more of the candidate translations to make the MBR decision. A lot more. And the way to do that is to build a lattice of translations during the search and then we do our MBR search over the lattice. Instead of 100 or 1000 best translations that we would use for the n-best approach, lattices give us access to a number that rivals the number of particles in the visible universe (really, it's huge).

Interested? You can read all about it here.

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Research Blog
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A grateful season

2009-01-04T03:37:00.000-08:00

The holidays are a time for giving, and Googlers across the globe have found some creative ways to give back to their communities this season. From raising money and crafting greeting cards to building gingerbread houses and giving blood, Googlers from east to west have been busy spreading good cheer. We've highlighted just a few of these efforts here, and we're looking forward to many more opportunities to give back in the new year.

London
The UK engineering recruitment team started to plan its annual Secret Santa gift exchange. But as they began thinking about last year, they realized that hardly anyone on the team could remember what they'd received, let alone given. Instead of spending 10 pounds on gag gifts, they decided to use the money to make a difference. After discovering that a local children's hospital was in desperate need of gifts, they quickly raised enough money to buy a Nintendo Wii gaming console for one of the wards.

Mexico City
In the past, Google has held a "Doodle 4 Google" contest in the US, the UK, and Australia, inviting kids K-12 to submit a homepage doodle inspired by a particular theme. This year Mexico held its first such contest (theme: "the Mexico we want"). For each doodle submitted, Google donated to a non-profit that works to eradicate childhood malnutrition in Mexico. In total, more than 70,000 kilos (154,000 pounds) of food and aid were donated. Winner, Ana Karen Villagómez, was recently recognized in a ceremony in Mexico City; her doodle (pictured below) will appear on the Google homepage on January 6.

Boston and beyond
Boston Googlers delivered gifts to some very grateful students at a local school and spent the morning reading and playing with the children. The Chicago office held its first-ever holiday blood drive, donating 36 units of blood. And the Ann Arbor office held a "CANstruction" competition, creating sculptures out of canned food, personal items and baby items, which were all later donated.

We hope that your holiday season is filled with plenty of time to slow down and reflect on what's important to you, and that you too feel inspired to find ways to give back to your own community in the new year.

Posted by Eileen Duffy and Sarah Falck, AdWords Account Associates

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Blog
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One Week Until Macworld

2009-01-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

With one week until the start of Macworld, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what to expect at Google's booth.

At any given time, there will be plenty of Googlers at our booth available to answer questions about any Google software made for Mac or iPhone. Demo stations will be placed throughout the booth so that attendees can try out Google software on their own, and in many cases, talk to the people who helped create that software.

Additionally, there will be larger presentations in the booth each day covering specific topics in more depth. Our goal is to make these presentations as interactive as possible, so we are hoping for feedback from Macworld attendees in the booth on the topics they'd like to see discussed.

We are very excited about Macworld and hope that you'll stop by our booth if you're in the area!

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mac Blog
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Looking back, looking forward

2008-12-31T19:25:00.000-08:00

Posted by Alan Davidson, Director, Public Policy and Government Affairs

It's hard to believe that another spectacular year is already coming to a close. It seems like just yesterday I was waxing nostalgic about our achievements in 2007. Here are just a few highlights from 2008:

There's no place like home
When I first joined Google in 2005, we didn't have a permanent office in D.C., which made for a quasi-nomadic lifestyle. So take it from me, it was great to welcome everyone to the grand opening of our permanent Washington office in January. Since then we've welcomed literally thousands of guests - from state finalists and regional Doodle4Google winners to Hispanic College Fund scholars - for dozens of events large and small. (Not to be outdone, the Federal division of Google's Enterprise Sales group moved into their own new office in nearby Reston, VA this year.)

Our new space has been the perfect place to host "Google D.C. Talks," our series of panel discussions on technology policy for the broader Washington community. Topics have ranged from the state of the Internet economy to digital natives, and in November we launched a three-part series of "Talks" focusing on the 2009 technology policy agenda.

Keeping busy at the FCC
It was a busy year at the Federal Communications Commission. In March the FCC announced the results of its 700 MHZ spectrum auction. Google didn't pick up any spectrum licenses, but our bidding helped drive the auction past the $4.6 billion reserve price, triggering two key openness conditions: open access and open devices. Then in November, the FCC voted 5-0 to open up the "white spaces" spectrum for wireless broadband service for the public, paving the way for affordable, high-speed wireless Internet across the United States - in other words, "Wi-Fi on steroids."

In a very short time the wireless world has transformed from a tightly closed ecosystem to one that's becoming more and more open. It's been gratifying to see the progress that has been made, and exciting to think about the work that still needs to be done.

The Google/YouTube election
The Internet emerged as a clear winner in this year's presidential election, with Google and YouTube leading the way. Millions of Americans watched thousands of videos of Barack Obama and John McCain on YouTube. They used Google's Voter Info site to find out where to vote, how to register, and how to contact local election officials. Google and YouTube were out in force at the Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention, and on Election Day, users flocked to Google Maps as real-time election results rolled in.

President-elect Obama has pledged to use the Web as a major communications tool -- he's already broadcasting his weekly radio address on YouTube. It will be interesting to watch how he'll use the Internet to communicate with citizens once he takes office.

Yahoo ads deal
There were disappointments for us this year, too. In June we announced a nonexclusive ads deal that would have allowed Yahoo to show more relevant ads for searches that currently generate few or no advertisements. We spent a lot of time explaining the benefits of the deal, but it became clear that government regulators and certain advertisers still had concerns. Rather than become distracted by a protracted legal battle, we decided to end the agreement in November and instead focus on continuing to deliver innovative products for our users.

Googlers on the Hill
Last but not least, co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt spent some quality time in D.C. this year. Larry hit Capitol Hill in May and September to push for "white spaces," and in November Eric talked about the economy and clean energy. And several Googlers testified before Congress this year on issues like small business, privacy, free expression, competition, and energy efficiency: David Fischer, Jane Horvath, Nicole Wong, David Drummond, and Dan Reicher.

As 2008 made clear, the world of tech policy is fast-paced and constantly evolving. With a new President and Congress coming to Washington in 2009, it's an exciting time to be working on these issues.

From our team to all of you, happy holidays and warm wishes for the new year.

[NFGB] Link - from Google Public Policy Blog
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NORAD Tracks Santa Flash Map: Behind the Scenes

2008-12-31T19:14:00.000-08:00

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

For the second year in a row, Google partnered with NORAD to provide an online map-based interface for tracking Santa's Dec. 24th sleigh ride across the world. Last year, the map was powered with the JavaScript Maps API. As the programmer for this year's map, I made the decision to use the Maps API for Flash instead. Why? I desperately wanted a glittery "comet trail" to follow Santa's path, and those kinds of effects are easier to pull off in Flash. (One might argue that decisions shouldn't be based on glitter, but one could counter that by pointing out the entire 1970s decade was based on glitter).

While converting the map over to Flash, I wrote code that may be helpful to other Flex developers out there. Instead of just open-sourcing the Santa Tracker map code* and forcing you to sort through it all, I've created standalone demos and descriptions for each of the features:

Comet Trail: The purpose of the trail was to show Santa's recent trajectory, and give the flight more movement. The cloudy trail effect was achieved by creating a custom overlay that drew a line of increasing width through the 7 most recent markers, and then applying a BlurFilter to that line. To achieve the glitter effect on top of that, I create invisible circles of increasing radius around the markers, and then dynamically load in a sparkle SWF at random points within those circles. To get a twinkle instead of a strobe effect, each sparkle SWF is started at a different random frame in its timeline.
Check out the demo or source code.
Embedded Youtube: The real highlight of Santa's ride are the 23 locations where we have "Santa Cams" (Youtube videos), so it was important that we were able to view those Youtube videos on the map. It's a surprisingly difficult task, due to the facts that: 1) the embedded Youtube video player is an AS2 SWF, 2) the Santa map is an AS3 SWF, 3) the Youtube SWF has to be "destroyed" before a new Youtube SWF can play, and 4) AS3 SWFs cannot call methods inside an AS2 SWF. With help from the Youtube team and the AS3 Chromeless player library code, I was finally able to get Youtube + Flex to cooperate. The solution involves the creation of a "bridge" SWF in AS2 that communicates via LocalConnection to the AS3 SWF to load/unload videos, and it also involved a whole lot of random numbers.
Check out the demo or source code.
Smart Info Windows: To show all the locations, the map's default zoom was a viewport showing the whole world. Using the standard infowindows, this meant that when the user clicked on a location in the Northern hemisphere like the North Pole, the infowindow would pop up above the marker and pan the map so that the user just saw a whole lot of grey. Since I hate grey (it's the antithesis of glitter) and wanted a better user experience, Flash API engineer Dmitri Abramov wrote a "smart" info window for me that automatically opens in the direction (top, bottom, left, right) that minimizes panning.
Check out the demo or source code.
JavaScript <-> Flex: Though the map was coded in Flex, many pages on the NORAD site were just JS/HTML. The "RADAR" data was stored as JSON, and common JavaScript functions were used for figuring out the current time and then calculating the current location and phase from that information. So, to avoid replicating all the same logic and data in AS3, we instead used ExternalInterface to send information from the JavaScript to the map, along with some open-source libraries for encoding JSON objects into strings and decoding the strings into AS3 objects.
Check out the demo or source code.
Full Screen: A day before the map was set to go live, I realized that I'd been debugging the map SWF at 100% width/height all the time, when it was in fact going to be embedded inside a 500*450px space on the NORAD site. It depressed me that users wouldn't get to experience the map at the same size, so I searched Google for information on enabling full-screen on Flex apps, and happily discovered it was ridiculously easy to do - just a few lines of code, an "allowFullScreen" param in the HTML, and a toggle-able Flex Image control.
Check out the demo or source code.

* Okay, yeah, I open-sourced the whole code as well, mostly because I've developed an unhealthy dependence on Google Code's nifty subversion repositories and issue trackers. Finding the NORAD repository is left as an exercise to the reader.

[NFGB] Link - from Google Geo Developers Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Update to the Google Maps API Terms of Service
Google Earth... in your browser... on your Mac!
This week in San Francisco: Virtual Globes!
2008 in Google Geo Land: All Lit Up

In Memoriam: A Salute to Those Who Departed in 2008

2008-12-31T19:11:00.000-08:00

As 2008 comes to a close, we pause to pay our respects to those notables we lost this year. Today's homepage salute honors a wide range of the dearly departed -- amongst them, a 20th Century movie legend admired for his work in philanthropy, the South African singer and human rights activist known as "Mama Africa", a comedian who shared the humor behind "Seven Dirty Words," to a computer science professor who taught his life's wisdom via "The Last Lecture".

Here one of the world's best-known mountaineers and explorers receives a musical tribute by a group of fellow New Zealanders who sing the praises of this "Humble Mountain Man."

As you watch this series of video tributes, we encourage you to share your own memories in celebration of the things these remarkable people shared with the world.

In Memoriam,

The YouTube Team

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Tracking Santa: the backstory
forGoogle Image Search
Black Googlers work:buildingmmunity
Black Googlers

Japanese WMC Blog launched

2008-12-31T18:56:00.000-08:00

Konnichiwa! Hajimemashite! *Hello, Nice to meet you!

We just launched a new Webmaster Central Blog in Japanese. For those of you who feel more comfortable reading Japanese, and are interested in webmaster-related information from Google, and even learning about issues specific to our region and language, we hope you enjoy on our Japanese version of the Webmaster Central Blog :D

Written by Naoko Imai, Search Quality Team

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
One Week Until Macworld
Google at Macworld Expo
Bringing Your Photos Home
Fast PDF viewing right in your browser

Send A Filmmaker To Sundance

2008-12-31T18:46:00.000-08:00

Drum roll please…the prestigious programming team at the Sundance Film Festival has reviewed the many outstanding films submitted to this year's Project Direct short film competition and the results are in!

We were thrilled to see so many of you who competed in last year's contest return for more, and we were equally thrilled to see so much new talent alongside them.

In fact, some of last year's finalists made it into the top 10 once again, proving that filmmakers on YouTube are not one-hit wonders, but consistent, talented storytellers.

Now it's up to all of you to decide which of these 10 filmmakers will make it to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT.

The filmmakers' challenge was to create a short film including 3 specific props: a red phone and 2 other props made famous by films from the Sundance Film Festival's 25 year history.

Your challenge is to watch them all and vote for your favorites at youtube.com/ProjectDirect.

For a sneak peek of the top 10, check out Darren Aronofsky's video announcing the finalists:

Now start voting! You have until 11:59PM EST on January 3rd to cast your ballot.

Enjoy,
Sara P.
YouTube Film

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Tracking Santa: the backstory
New search-by-style options for Google Image Search
A holiday break to play with all the new stuff

New in Labs: Turn an email into a Google doc

Today's Totally Awesome Guest Editors

2008-12-27T03:52:00.002-08:00

A week ago, the vlogbrothers took a break from their usual routine of filming puppies doing cute things and punishing each other, to launch the "Project for Awesome," a call to all YouTube users to "take over YouTube" by creating videos that promote their favorite charity, nonprofit or cause.

Today, we're adding the YouTube stamp of approval to this worthy project by having the vlogbrothers "take over" the YouTube homepage with their favorite submissions to the Project for Awesome...and with over 1190 entries, this guest editorship was no easy task:

The vlogbrothers' selections range from the hilarious to the serious, the absurd to the informative -- the tie that binds them together is that each video features a YouTube community member who is trying to make the world a better place (or as the vlogbrothers might say, "trying to reduce world suck").

It's not too late for you to help make the world a little more awesome in 2009 -- you can add your comments or ratings to these videos (karmic points if you rate high) or make your own video about the cause that inspires you most.

Have fun,
Ramya R.
YouTube Nonprofits & Activism

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube Blog
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Tracking Santa: the backstory
New search-by-style options for Google Image Search
Black Googlers Network: building community

Jean Bartik: the untold story of a remarkable ENIAC programmer

Inside AdSense: Warm wishes

2008-12-27T03:52:00.001-08:00

From all of us here in Mountain View, have a safe and happy holiday season!

(Members of the AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Ad Manager teams pictured above.)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

[NFGB] Link - from Inside AdSense
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Win a Trip to Davos, and Have Your Say

2008-12-25T06:47:00.000-08:00

It's been a year of crisis in the global economy. The collapse of credit has left countless people in crushing debt, prompted governments to bail out their nation's strongest companies and brought instability to markets that had seen decades of fast growth in a newly globalized economy.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it often takes a crisis to bring about change.

This year at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the world's top thinkers and leaders will gather to discuss how to bring about that change. They believe that fresh solutions have to come from fresh sources, so they're asking for your help: YouTube is partnering with WEF to give you the chance to join the debate on four key issues facing the planet today. One lucky YouTuber will even get to fly to Davos, all expenses paid, to attend the Forum, which takes place January 28-February 1, 2009.

It's called the Davos Debates - and there are four main topics being discussed: the economy, politics, ethics, and the environment. Go to the Davos Debates YouTube channel to vote on the 4 questions - or add your own video outlining your ideas for shaping the post-crisis world. WEF will choose the top video submitted by January 20, and that person will get to fly to Switzerland to join the discussion in person.

In addition, many of your videos will be played at panel sessions at Davos, where world leaders will listen to your thoughts and opinions as they debate these issues. Tell them your personal stories: how are the world's new challenges affecting your life, and what do you want to see happen next?

We live in a world that continually presents new challenges but also offers seemingly limitless possibilities. This is your chance to impact history with your own creative ideas. So submit your video by January 20, and help shape our collective future in 2009.

Steve Grove

YouTube News and Politics

[NFGB] Link - from YouTube Blog
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Tracking Santa: the backstory
New search-by-style options for Google Image Search
Black Googlers Network: building community

Jean Bartik: the untold story of a remarkable ENIAC programmer

Dev update: New Gears

2008-12-25T06:31:00.001-08:00

Google Chrome's Dev channel has been updated to version 1.0.154.42. This release fixes a few minor bugs, and updates Gears to 0.5.8.0 to fix an occasional crash in some sites with offline applications enabled.

Find about the Dev channel and how to subscribe at http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.

The complete list of bugs fixed are available in the release notes.

--Mark Larson, Google Chrome Program Manager

[NFGB] Link - from Google Chrome Releases
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Google Gadgets for Linux 0.10.4

2008-12-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

The 0.10.4 release of Google Gadgets for Linux is out, with optimized performance and memory consumption, as well as many bug fixes. To install or upgrade your copy of Google Gadgets for Linux, just download and install the binaries for your platform.

The new release supports more gadgets, including the recently released YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs gadgets. Here's a picture of the YouTube gadget running on Linux.

The next picture shows the Gmail and Google Docs gadgets running on Linux. Note: If you've already unsuccessfully tried using the Gmail gadget, be sure to download the latest version of the Gmail gadget.

If you're a developer, try the dramatically improved Gadget Designer. It can now create new gadgets, and it runs as a separate application. Here's a picture.

As always, you can find the source code at the google-gadgets-for-linux project.

Posted by James Su and Kathy Walrath, Google Desktop Team

[NFGB] Link - from Inside Google Desktop
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Sharpening our focus in global development

2008-12-25T06:11:00.000-08:00

As you might expect from a company founded by two engineers and an infusion of start up cash, Google believes in the power of entrepreneurs and small businesses to drive innovation and spur job growth. So it wasn't surprising that when we considered areas to support with our philanthropic efforts, helping entrepreneurs in developing countries rose to the top. This past January we launched an initiative to Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs in developed countries account for half of GDP and two-thirds of jobs, but they're largely absent in developing countries. We wanted to explore how we could help drive capital to these high-growth businesses. At the same time, we launched a parallel effort to increase access to vital information in poor countries. This effort, known as Inform and Empower, aims to help improve the quality of public services by organizing critical information and making it accessible to all (sound familiar?).

We still strongly believe that growing small businesses will help the poor, but one of Google's ten organizing principles is, "it's best to do one thing really, really well." As we evaluated our efforts this past year, it became clear that given Google.org's unique strengths - including the ability to tap Google engineers to build and link better pathways to information - we could have a greater impact on the lives of the poor by focusing our efforts on Inform and Empower. As a result, we're putting our SME initiative on the back burner. We'll continue to support the grants and investments that we've already committed under the initiative. We have observed and learned from many others addressing the challenges of financing SMEs -- many of whom are seeing significant strong results -- and we hope they continue with great success. At this time, however, we will not fund new efforts in the SME space.

Google remains committed to its philanthropic goal: using information and technology to take on some of the world's greatest challenges. We continue to draw upon resources of 1% equity, 1% profit, and employee time, as outlined by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in their 2004 letter to investors. We've had a strong year of giving since the launch of our initiatives. We know that the global financial crisis is disproportionately affecting the poor and plan to increase our overall giving in 2009.

Posted by Sonal Shah, Head of Global Development, Google.org

[NFGB] Link - from Official google.org Blog
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A holiday break to play with all the new stuff
New in Labs: Turn an email into a Google doc
Tracking Santa: the backstory
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Black Googlers Network: building community

2008-12-25T05:34:00.001-08:00

We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And we aspire to be an organization that reflects global diversity, because we know that a world's worth of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We have more than a dozen employee-driven resource groups, from Gayglers to GWE (Google Women Engineers), that actively participate around the world in building community and driving policy at Google. This is the next post in our Interface series, which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit Life at Google on our Jobs site. – Ed.

It's been a busy few months for the Black Googlers Network (BGN). One of our group's core goals is to build a community that keeps us connected, facilitates the sharing of ideas, and participates in community outreach. We sponsored a variety of events this fall across many of our offices, giving us the opportunity to give back and have some fun while doing it.

To kick things off, a group of us from the Mountain View, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago and Atlanta offices, to name a few, rolled up our sleeves for our first annual service trip. We headed to New Orleans in September to aid in the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts. Undeterred by Hurricane Gustav, which unexpectedly hit the coast the week before we arrived, we managed to make some adjustments to flights and itineraries and were some of the first volunteers back into the city.

We partnered with the St. Bernard Project, learning everything from how to lay flooring to installing drywall as we worked on three homes. Additionally, we joined a strategy session with The Idea Village, helping them kick off their newest initiative, the 504ward Project. The opportunity to serve the community in such a meaningful way while getting to know BGN members was unique. We each put our minds, bodies, and souls into the city and the experience.

Next, BGN participated in the United Negro College Fund's annual Walk-a-thon in Oakland, CA. Our Google-UNCF partnership also includes an annual scholarship for college students pursing a degree in engineering or computer science, and we're continuing to explore different ways to support and encourage underrepresented students.

This month, we're coming together in many of our offices for the holidays, giving ourselves a chance to catch up and take stock of the work we've done over the past year. Not to be slowed down for too long, though, as we will soon begin the exciting process of planning our new initiatives for 2009.

Posted by Alexa Bush, University Programs Team

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Blog
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Fast PDF viewing right in your browser
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2008 Year in Review

2008-12-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

By Mike Marchak, Google Developer Team

Before looking back on this past year, we'd like to thank the developer community for your involvement and enthusiasm in 2008. Without you none of our accomplishments would've been possible and coming to work would not have been nearly as rewarding or exciting.

In 2008 the developer team at Google made it significantly easier for developers to build increasingly sophisticated web apps. Looking back, some of the most notable events from the last year include the AppEngine launch, GWT 1.5 launch, Chrome launch, AJAX Language API launch, AJAX Libraries API launch and the broad adoption of OpenSocial.

We also worked hard to make it simple to integrate and extend Google applications through the launch of the You Tube API, Visualization API, Maps for Flash API, Finance API and Custom Search API.

We were also really happy to participate in the Open Handset Alliance where we saw the announcement of the Android Developer Challenge winners, the Android 1.0 SDK launch, and the first app downloads in the Android Market.

Our favorite part of 2008, however, was interacting with you at Google I/O and at Developer Days. These events allowed us to meet inspirational developers in 15 countries around the world who are building fantastic applications.

In 2009, we look forward to building products to make the web better and that let you, the developer community, build better apps on the web. We are already excited about seeing you at events next year.

Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team.

[NFGB] Link - from Google Code Blog
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YouTube　3's >

Light up your site

2008-12-25T05:30:00.000-08:00

We all know how it feels to find the perfect gift. After scouring stores far and wide, suddenly your hunt is over: the stars have aligned to bring you just what you're looking for -- and not a moment too soon. It's a bit the same way when a search brings you to just the right site. But what if your site's just the right site, and users can't find it?

We're happy to let you know that you don't need divine forces to play a role in the findability of your site. Nope -- you can help make sure that your site turns up just when it should by taking advantage of these tips from our Search Quality Team.

Not sure if all your pages are being seen by Google? Search for your site's address after the command "site", like [site:example.com]. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the topic of a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
If you upload new pages or topics faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Google Sitemap and include a refresh rate.
Label your images appropriately. Users searching in Google Image Search will more easily find the image on your site. Don't miss out on potential traffic because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so you should take advantage of it.
Manage your SiteLinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as SiteLinks, so remember you can remove any that you don't think users will find useful.
Check for errors and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.
Serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you've retired a page permanently, serve a 404. If you've simply relocated it, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the faster we will find the next best page on your site for a given query.
Users and search engines like organic content. Make some of your own!
Read our recently released SEO Starter Guide.
Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.
Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
Get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.
Find answers to your questions in our Webmaster Help Center, or ask your questions in the Webmaster Help Group.

Whether it be the perfect gift, the perfect site, or the perfect cup of cocoa on a cold winter's night, we hope all your searches are fruitful this holiday season.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

[NFGB] Link - from Inside AdSense
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Feliz Navidad from the Spanish Webmaster Central team!

2008-12-25T05:22:00.000-08:00

About three and a half months ago we kicked off the Spanish Webmaster Central blog hoping to reach many webmasters. Given the time of the year, we would like to say a big ¡Muchas Gracias! to all our readers.

It's been both a pleasure and a great opportunity for us to share our knowledge and hear your feedback. A few of this year's highlights:

For the blog, we had:

Matt Cutts talking to us in a 3 part interview (see part 1, part 2, and part 3).
A series of videos explaining how to use Webmaster Tools (See all parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6)
The links series and the 404 series.
Google's SEO Starter Guide in Spanish.

As for conferences, we had the chance to talk to some of you in:

SMX Madrid 2008.
Google Search Masters 2008 in Mexico. We even have some video footage from this conference, including a session about the Help Group :)
Congreso de Webmasters 2008.

And last, but not least, the Spanish Help Group, with lots of interesting stories.

This is us, several members of the Spanish Webmaster Central team:

From left to right: Cristina, Alvar, Rebecca, and Esperanza in Google's Dublin office, with a holiday touch :)

Written by Alvar López, Search Quality Team

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush
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Tracking Santa: the backstory

2008-12-25T05:18:00.000-08:00

When I look back on four years of tracking Old St. Nick on Christmas Eve, I can't help but smile. The Santa tracker has really come a long way. I always thought NORAD's Santa Tracker was a great holiday tradition, but I felt like it could have been even better if people could visualize exactly where Santa was on Christmas Eve. So in 2004, shortly after Keyhole was acquired by Google, we followed Santa in the "Keyhole Earth Viewer" — Google Earth's original name — and we called it the "Keyhole Santa Radar." The audience was relatively small since Keyhole was still a for-pay service at that point, and we hosted everything on a single machine shared with the Keyhole Community BBS server. We probably should have had three separate servers to host the Santa tracker — that first year, we had only a portion of a single machine. That night, about 25,000 people kept tabs on Santa and, needless to say, wreaked some havoc on our servers!

Over the next two years, our Santa-tracking efforts improved dramatically. By December 2005, Keyhole had become Google Earth and our audience had become much, much larger. Our "Santa Radar" team also grew: we used greatly improved icons from Dennis Wang, the Google Doodler, and set up 20 machines to serve the tracking information. My colleague Michael Ashbridge took over the software and more than 250,000 people tracked Santa on Google Earth that Christmas Eve. In 2006, Google acquired SketchUp, a 3D modeling software that enabled us to include models of Santa's North Pole workshop and sleigh. We also incorporated a tracking feed directly from NORAD's headquarters, and we were now displaying NORAD's information in Google Earth. That year, more than a million people tracked Santa.

In 2007, Google became NORAD's official Santa Tracking technology partner and hosted http://www.noradsanta.org/. In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on "Santa Cam" arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google's infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously.

This year, Googler Bruno Bowden is in charge of the Santa software, and we have further upgraded our server capacity. We're hoping this version of the tracker will be the best yet. In addition to our "Santa Cam" footage, geo-located photos from Panoramio will be viewable in Google Maps for each of Santa's stops that don't include video. We've also included a few new ways to track Santa. With Google Maps for mobile, anyone can keep tabs on him from their mobile phones (just activate GMM and search for "norad santa"). You can also receive updates from "Bitz the Elf" on Twitter by following @noradsanta. And of course, be sure to visit http://www.noradsanta.org/ tomorrow morning starting at 6:00 am EST when Santa's journey begins. Enjoy, and see you in 2009!

Posted by Brian McClendon, Original Google Engineering Elf

[NFGB] Link - from The Official Google Blog
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Black Googlers Network: building community
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@Twitter: Welcome to Google Friend Connect

2008-12-25T05:17:00.000-08:00

We know many of you enjoy using Twitter to see what people are talking about and to let others know what you've been up to, whether it's sharing a YouTube video or checking in on your friend's tweets. To help you and your Twitter network stay connected no matter where you are on the web, we're excited to announce that Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.

To send a tweet about a site you have joined, click the invite link in the members gadget, then click the Twitter icon on the share tab. The next time your followers sign in to Twitter, they'll see your tweet containing a link to the interesting site you've found.

This integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Blog
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Even more GPS trails in Google Earth

2008-12-25T05:12:00.000-08:00

As holiday season approaches, are you planning a trip somewhere? If you are an outdoor person and would like to make hiking, biking, or even flying part of your fun, then make sure you check out the new EveryTrail layer before you go. The EveryTrail layer showcases GPS trails captured by outdoor adventurer with pictures taken along the trails. Download a trail by clicking on any picture in an EveryTrail balloon and start a virtual tour of your destination. If you prefer strolling around cities, there are plenty of trips in EveryTrail layer to help you discover best places to visit.

See this video to get an overview of the layer:

Here are a few of our favorite trails:

Kyoto - Visit Kiyomizudera, Ginkakuji, and Ryoanji Temples

Kalalau Trail, Kauai, Hawaii

Exploring Galapagos

Posted by Wei Luo and Pete Giencke, Google Earth Team

[NFGB] Link - from Google LatLong
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New search-by-style options for Google Image Search

2008-12-25T05:05:00.000-08:00

Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).

Today we're pleased to extend this capability to clip art and line drawings. To see the effect of these new options, let's take a look at the first few results for "Christmas," one of our most popular queries on Image Search right now.

Photo content

Clip art

Line drawing

All of these options can be selected from the "Any content" drop down in the blue title bar on any search results page, or by selecting one of the "Content types" on the Advanced Image Search page. The good news: no extra typing! In all these examples our query remained exactly the same, we just restricted our results to different visual styles. So whether you're interested holiday wreaths, Celtic patterns, or office clip art, it just became a lot easier to find the images you're looking for.

Posted by Sean O'Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Blog
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So long, 2008!

2008-12-25T04:59:00.000-08:00

Before the year comes to a close, we wanted to share some of our proudest 2008 moments with you and wish your organization a safe and joyous holiday season.

We're growing up! In April, we celebrated our fifth birthday with over 4,000 non-profit organizations, 700 Googler volunteers and more than 20 countries worldwide. Thinking back to when the program launched in 2003, with only a few organizations and a vision of extending the power of AdWords to the non-profit community, it sure does feel like we've come a long way.

Another piece of our program's initial goal was the ability to offer AdWords grants worldwide. To that end, we worked hard this year to launch Google Grants in eight new countries and territories -- China, Israel, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Mexico, Austria and Belgium.

We then spent a good part of the year implementing the technology at our fingertips by launching the Google Grants Blog and Help Forum, enabling us to better share our webinar series, tracking tips, success stories and other helpful information on a broader scale with grantees and the greater non-profit community.

Just a short while later in October, we also unveiled our new website. We're hoping this new site, with its improved navigation and dynamic content, will help us tie together the technology, information and community resources we're striving to develop for the benefit of your organizations.

It's been a busy year, with more excitement to come in the next 12 months. We're looking forward to kicking back with a a hot mug of cocoa to reflect on the year's accomplishments and begin cooking up more program improvements for you and your organization in 2009.

Cheers to the new year!

Posted by Jessica, Google Grants Team

[NFGB] Link - from Google Grants Blog
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Resource Round-up for December
Google Website Optimiser, Part 3: How do I use Website Optimiser?
You're invited to the new Google Grants Help Forum!

Wishing you and your site a happy holiday!

2008-12-25T04:56:00.000-08:00

Your presence is our favorite present -- thanks for joining us for another year of making your site, and therefore the web, a better place.

Every day we see new people commenting and joining the discussion. This holiday season we'll try to update our blog to accommodate your growing needs. Always feel free to let us know how we're doing (especially if we publish a typo! :), because first and foremost and everywhere in the middle, we're trying to improve for you.

Happy holidays from all of us at Webmaster Central.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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It's Hear: Audio Ads Getting Started Guide

2008-12-25T04:51:00.000-08:00

Are you interested in running radio ads with Google, but you're not sure how to start? Have no fear, the new Audio Getting Started Guide is hear. You'll find that you can learn a lot from reading its comprehensive step-by step guidelines for creating a Google Audio Ads campaign.

(Click on the image for a full-size version)

From creating a radio ad to analyzing your results with our Audio Ads Reports, the Getting Started Guide will take you through the complete process. It also has helpful screen shots, demos, and extended information, including:

Station Format Guide
Ad Creation Marketplace Video Demo
Editorial and Technical Guidelines
Audio Ads Reports & Explanations

(Click on the image for a full-size version)

With all this knowledge at your fingertips, you'll have everything you need to start advertising your business with Google Audio Ads!

by Julie Picquet, Account Manager for Google Audio Ads

[NFGB] Link - from Traditional Media: Let's Take it Offline
Related From Google Blogs:
Driving Attendance with Google Audio Ads
Create Custom Dayparts in Google TV Ads Campaigns
Beta Launch: Demographic Search for TV Ads
Launched: Copy Settings to a New TV Campaign

Happy Holidays from the Google Mobile Team!

2008-12-25T04:02:00.000-08:00

We hope you have a safe and happy (and mobile!) holiday season. To wrap things up, here are some final holiday Mobile Tricks.

Ted Smolsen shows how he does last-minute shopping using Google Docs and Google Maps for mobile...

George shows how he keeps in touch with far-off relatives with a cameraphone, Picasa Webalbums, and a WiFi-enabled picture frame

and after your holiday meal, try ChangChangYall's Full-O-lator to understand what your relatives are saying.

From the Google Mobile team, search for recipes on your phone, use mobile YouTube to keep antsy kids at the dinner table, and remember to search for local times to wish your far-off friends a happy new year.

Posted by Effie Seiberg, Google Mobile Trickster

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Mobile Blog
Related From Google Blogs:
Optimized search results pages for Android and iPhone
Net neutrality and the benefits of caching
The gift of Mobile Tricks
Creating change with your homepage