A year in Google blogging

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

The definition of "googol" is a number, and Google lives by numbers. So how else should we look back over the year but with numerical bits? Here goes: This post marks the 294th time this year you're reading a post from us -- that's nearly 100 more posts than in 2005. In the last 12 months, we unveiled 24 new products here. We wrote up 128 product upgrades, new features and how-to-use-it items. We told you about 7 acquisitions. We blogged about policies or issues 23 times, on subjects including Google in China, how Book Search works, click fraud, and Net Neutrality. Google.org yielded 7 posts, and 29 times we said various services are available in many countries and languages. Then there was a pug, Google's custom It's It, our compelling matchmaking service, and a nearly-cosmic Stardate.

More for the numerically inclined: 7.6 million unique visitors generated nearly 15 million pageviews this year. Aside from the U.S. and UK, readers come from India, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands. Which sites send us the most readers? The top non-Google referrers this year are the influential Digg.com and Slashdot.

But we didn't just hope that readers would come to us. We also launched company blogs in China, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, and Russia (and more are coming in 2007). We also launched AdSense-specific blogs for publishers who speak Dutch, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Product teams also started up quite a roster of new blogs covering everything from Custom Search Engines to Google Book Search to our Mac and Enterprise endeavors. If you want to keep current with nearly 40 corporate blogs we now publish, here's the Atom feed, the Google Reader share option, and the OPML file (English language blogs only).

Which posts caught your eye? Apart from the front page, these were among the most popular:

• Google Earth for Macs
• our (classic?) 2005 explanation of how "Googlebombing" works
• downloading public domain books
• Gmail open signup (from August 2005, but apparently word kept spreading)
• the Writely acquisition (now part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets)

It wasn't all fun, though; there was the time the blog disappeared. (Of course, that was before the recent Blogger revamp.) But even if real-time, all-too-human goof-ups make it a bit harrowing on occasion, the fact is a company blog is the fastest way to reach out. So we hope you continue to enjoy the rich stew we aim to serve. And before long, perhaps you can begin leaving comments directly. We're working on that. Meanwhile, our very best for a satisfying 2007 to you and yours.

Update: Clarified the fact that the number of posts increased by 100 over a year.

How we came up with year-end Zeitgeist data

Posted by Artem Boytsov, Software Engineer

The Zeitgeist is "the spirit of time." This is why when we come up with the lists of top searches on Google.com for 2006, we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period -- the truth is, they don't change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as "ebay", "dictionary", "yellow pages," "games," "maps" -- and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don't think they actually define the Zeitgeist.

Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 -- the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006's most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. ("Bebo", for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our "what is" and "who is" lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.

A final note: there was some confusion over the use of descriptors like "most popular" and "fastest-gaining" in media reports about our Zeitgeist. We've edited the 2006 Year-End Zeitgeist description to be more accurate on this point: "we compared frequent queries this year against 2005 to see what sorts of things were top of mind."

We hope you enjoyed our year-end Zeitgeist as much as we enjoyed working on it!

Speech-friendly textual directions from Google Maps

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Google Maps and its associated local search is a quick and easy means of locating businesses and obtaining directions. Most people who use it already seem to enjoy the graphical interface with its extremely reactive GUI. But when using spoken output, this visual richness can get in the way of quickly listening to the results of a maps query.

As an alternative, Google Maps also provides a simple to use a textual interface that serves up directions very efficiently when working with a screenreader or a Braille display. This alternative view into Google Maps is here, at the Textual Maps UI (http://maps.google.com/?output=html). It's extremely useful for blind and visually impaired users, as well as an effective solution for those times when you're at a non-graphical display and need to quickly look up a location.

Just type a simple English query of the form start address to end address and quickly get the information you're looking for. Though we added this option to enhance the accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, perhaps others will find this alternative view a useful addition to their maps arsenal.

Where on Earth is Santa?

Posted by Melissa Crounse, Chief Elf

As you know, every Christmas Eve Santa Claus gets busy on his tricked-out sleigh, soaring around the globe to deliver presents to (presumably deserving) children the world over. This year, even if you don't have a reindeer team of your own, you can use the Google Earth Santa Tracker (That's earth.google.com/santa.) Follow along on every step of Santa's travels with Donner, Blitzen, and of course Rudolph, in all their 3-D satellite glory. And to all a good flight -- er, night!

SuperTux 0.3.0 released

SuperTux 0.3.0 was released is now out in the wild. This is a preview of milestone 2, so expect something a little rough on the edges. Still, it should be fun to play and hopefully attract a bit more community help to the project. Go grab it whilst it is hot.

My favourite game Fish Fillets got a minor update to version 0.7.4, including the final level.

SuperTuxKart development has not slowed. Recently there was the contribution of an island level. With improved physics - and wheelies! - I think the next SuperTuxKart release is shaping up to be an awesome little game.

Blogger's new bag of tricks

Posted by Lexi Baugher, Software Engineer

Blogger has always been the easiest-to-use blogging software around, but it just got way more powerful. We've added a bunch of new features, which you can check out in the new version:

• You can add stuff to your blog (cute cat photos, lists, feeds) without needing to know HTML.
• You can also make a completely unique template that has just the color scheme you want, without knowing any CSS.
  
• Don't want your mom to read your thoughts? Make a private blog.
• Label your posts, to group related ones together.
• Use one of our new templates.
• You can now sign in to Blogger using your Google Account.

Naturally, this is still a work in progress, and more exciting features are in the pipeline. Try it out and send your feedback!

Happy Holidays with Google Desktop 4.5

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Since the debut of the new transparent Sidebar in Google Desktop 4.5, we've been working to make it widely available outside of the English-speaking world. We're finally done, and now you can get it in any of 28 languages. And just in time for the holidays, we've added several holiday themed gadgets. More details are available on the Google Desktop Blog.

Battle Just Started 0.1.0

Battle Just Started is a fun multiplayer 3D tank game. It has slightly cartoonish graphics and a basic AI (so you can play single player) and is in the early stages of development, but there have been several releases this month already - "release early, release often!"

Also Stendhal 0.56 was released, adding a new city among other things.

Interesting FLOSS game news is a little slow on the ground at the moment.

*Charlie crouches down and puts his ear on the floor*

Accessible Search: Answers to common questions

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Since we launched Google Accessible Search in July, we have received lots of feedback along with many questions. I'll briefly summarize these with answers.

Q: Does Accessible Search filter out inaccessible content?
A: No. First of all, "accessible" is a very subjective measure; what's more, queries can vary widely with respect to how accessible the results are. As an example, if you are looking for information such as weather forecasts or reference material, like the definition of an unfamiliar term, the set will often consists of both accessible and inaccessible content. In these cases, Google Accessible Search promotes those results that have been measured to be more accessible. On the other hand, if the particular query is about videogames, the chances are fairly high that a majority of the best results for that query will be visually busy pages. So in the final analysis, we do not filter content in Google Accessible Search; we pick the best results exactly as we do with regular Google search, and then re-order the top results by their level of accessibility.

Q: The result set looks identical to regular search. Is this intentional?
A: The operational word in the above question is looks. Google Accessible Search does not in any way change the look and feel of Google search results. What it does is re-order results based on how accessible they are.

Q: How has Google enhanced navigating its search results?
A: Since Google Accessible Search launched, many people have sent feedback about the results page (both Google Accessible and regular search) being difficult to navigate with screenreaders. In response, we have updated the results pages in both cases to have section headers that can be used in conjunction with screenreader hotkeys to quickly skim through the page. Thus, once Google has responded to your search query, use your access technology's "move by section" keys to move between the section that displays sponsored ads and the individual results.

Q: How can I perform more complex searches?
A: Notice that http://labs.google.com/accessible has a link to Advanced Search in addition to the simple text box. Use this link to focus your search on documents in a specific language. The resulting search will continue to use Google Accessible Search for ordering the results.

Q: How can I compare regular search with Google Accessible?
A: Google Accessible Search is an experiment, and to be an effective experiment, people need to be able to easily compare the results obtained by using regular Google search versus Google Accessible. Notice that the top of the results page contains a pair of radio buttons labeled "Web Search" and "Accessible Search." You can easily repeat your search by pressing the appropriate radio button and clicking on the "submit" button.

Q: How can I make my site rank higher in Accessible Search?
A: Use our Webmaster Guidelines as a starting point. Once you've fully addressed these, I'd suggest reviewing your content to see how well it degrades gracefully. In addition to viewing the page in text-only mode (as the Guidelines suggest), also try the following additional checks:
- browse your site on a monochrome display;
- use your site without a mouse.

Update: Corrected to note that we *do not* filter Accessible Search content.

Mapping Europe

Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps

As part of our ongoing effort to connect people to information about the world -- or perhaps le monde, die welt, el mundo -- around them, I'm pleased to tell you about the addition of a new team to Google. Today we acquired Endoxon, an Internet mapping solutions company based in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The Endoxon team has demonstrated passion and innovation in online mapping and has developed compelling technology that will enhance our Google geo products worldwide. We're also excited about having a dedicated team in Europe that can bring a distinctively European focus to our Maps products in those markets.

Your easiest holiday task

Posted by Costin Manolache, Software Engineer

We launched Google Apps for Your Domain at the end of August, and since then we've been getting great feedback from people all over. Organizations from Thailand, Argentina, and even our neighbors in Palo Alto have set up private-label Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and spiffy customizable start pages for their custom domains. We think it's especially cool that thousands of students are able to connect better with their classmates -- and their schools' IT directors no longer need to wring their hands over spam and clogged inboxes.

"Hey, wait, Costin," you say. "That's great for them, but our organization doesn't have a custom domain."

Well, I'm excited to let you know that we've made signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain much easier for those of you that don't yet have your own domain. We've partnered with GoDaddy.com and eNom, two leading domain registration services, to offer domains for $10 per year. And I like the fact that we're including private registration to protect your personal information.

Now you've got one-stop shopping for all the services currently on the Google Apps for Your Domain platform -- just find a domain, buy it, and get started. We'll do all the behind-the-scenes configuration work for you. For now this is available for .com, .net,.org, .biz, and .info domains, but we're working on bringing it elsewhere soon. We're also constantly working to introduce more cool new features to this service, so be sure to check back for updates.

Holiday goodies from Picasa Web Albums

Posted by Adrian Graham, Product Manager, Picasa


What’s a holiday without the memorable (and embarrassing) photos? The holidays are almost here, which (at least if you’re in my family) means babies chewing on presents, the dog dressed in a ridiculous reindeer costume, and someone (cough, Uncle Charlie) passed out after too much eggnog. Although I think about this now and wince in advance, I know that I’m going to want to capture these moments and more importantly, share them with the rest of my family and friends. That’s why I’m excited about the new features we’ve added to Picasa Web Albums, just in time for the holidays.

Print ordering is my favorite—it’s something you have told us you've wanted since we first launched. Now, when you or anyone else views photos in Picasa Web Albums, there’s an option to order prints directly from the site. We currently offer prints and products from Shutterfly and PhotoWorks, but we’ll be adding more soon.

Other new features include video upload for easy sharing (it’s just like with photos—select them in Picasa and click the “Web Album” button) and searching tools. Now you can search over your own captions, album titles, and album descriptions, and you can even search for photos in your friends’ public albums. Digging up that picture of me trying to figure out which end of the holiday turkey is "up" should be easier than ever.

So check out these new features before all the festivities start. And however you celebrate the holidays this year, I hope you’ll take lots of pictures.

Free Ryzom

The Free Ryzom Campaign is an effort to make the code and the artwork of MMORPG Ryzom available under copyleft licenses. Just today the Free Software Foundation officially backed the campaign with a hefty $60,000 pledge.

Robert Schuster brought it to my attention. He also notes that the Ryzom team also produced the rather cool "levitating, meditating, flute-playing Gnu".

Needless to say, the gameplay video on ryzom.org is pretty impressive. Then again, most things are impressive to me these days since I haven't really indulged in commercial gaming since the turn of the millenium - so look for yourself!

Now you can search for U.S. patents

Posted by Doug Banks, Software Engineer

We've all heard about the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell -- famous inventors whose creative minds changed the course of history. But there are many more like them, and millions of inventions that have been patented in the U.S. alone -- from useful everyday items such as adhesive tape and contact lenses to, er, things useful in specific situations, like this shark protector suit or this amusement device incorporating simulated cheese and mice.

Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. Start your exploration at www.google.com/patents or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date. You can view images of original patents online.

Google Patent Search uses much of the same technology that powers Google Book Search, so you can scroll through pages and zoom in on text and illustrations just like you can with books.

It's a natural extension of our mission to make this public domain government information more easily accessible using Google’s search technology. We’re pleased to have started with over 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and look forward to expanding our coverage over time.

Update: Removed mention of saving and printing as we're still working on that.

Tis (almost) the season

Posted by Melissa Crounse, Chief Elf

This year, good old St. Nick has learned a new trick: he has dispatched a few of his most experienced elves to squirrel away some toys in the farthest corners of Google Earth. Every day from now until Christmas Eve, a clue will appear outside Santa's workshop leading to another toy -- and every day, the location of the previous day's toy will be revealed.

Ready to scour the earth and find your first toy? Once you've got the newest version of Google Earth installed, let's get started.

Nifty Toolbar upgrades for Firefox

Posted by Annie Sullivan, Software Engineer

Ever since the latest version of the Google Toolbar for IE came out, Firefox users have been asking when they'll see the same new features in their favorite browser. Well, we've been hard at work on a new version of the Toolbar for Firefox -- Google Toolbar 3 Beta -- that lets you access your bookmarks from any computer, add custom buttons to your Toolbar, and share web pages via Blogger, Gmail, and SMS.

In addition to adding all the features from the Google Toolbar for IE, there's another one just for Firefox users. When I surf the web, I want to be able to look at all the files I come across right in my browser. But a lot of times, I have to download files and view them with a separate application instead. Since Google Docs & Spreadsheets launched, I've been able to look at those files right in my browser. Except the process is kind of clunky right now: I have to right-click on a link, download the file to my machine, and then upload it to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I want to be able to just click on a link to a document or spreadsheet and have it show up in my browser. So I added a feature to the Google Toolbar for Firefox to do that.

Now you can surf the web a little bit faster. I hope you enjoy this feature as much as I do!

About Transferable Stock Options

Posted by Allan Brown, Director, Recognition & HR Systems

We work hard to attract and retain the world's best talent in a number of ways, and a part of that is offering competitive compensation packages. We offer standard things such as competitive salary, cash incentives, restricted stock units and stock options. But we also aim to be innovative. So today we're announcing a new compensation program called Transferable Stock Options (TSOs).

As with most employee stock option programs, Google's program to date has allowed employees to do two things with their options. Upon vesting they can (1) hold them or (2) exercise them and then hold or sell the stock. With the new TSO program, employees will have an additional alternative: they can transfer (sell) their options to a financial institution through a competitive bidding process. The ability to sell options is not a novel concept -- today people can buy and sell options to purchase GOOG stock and the stock of many other companies on the public markets. What is novel is that we are extending this ability to trade options to employee stock options.

Typically, employees get value from stock options by exercising them after vesting, and then selling the stock they get from the exercise at a higher price, provided the company's stock price has appreciated since the time of grant. With the TSO program, employees will also be able to sell vested options to the highest-bidding financial institution, which may be willing to pay a premium above the difference between the exercise price and the market price for Google stock (even when the exercise price is higher than the market price). The premium paid is for the time value of the options. More on that and how institutions would do this, and why, is here.

Employees will still have the choice of simply exercising and then holding or selling the stock too. But if they choose to sell the options, they can use a simple online tool that will show them the best price a participating financial institution is willing to pay for their vested options in real time. With that tool, they'll be able to sell their vested options to the highest bidder.

In addition to increasing the value of every option employees receive, the TSO program makes the value of their options much more tangible. In the past, employees typically valued Google stock options based simply on the difference between their option exercise price and the current market stock price (called the intrinsic value). Since Google grants options with exercise prices that are at, or above, the market price of Google stock, many employees do not value options on the day they are granted. By showing employees what financial institutions are willing to pay for their options, it is made clear that the value of their options is greater than just the intrinsic value.

We aren't offering this program for everyone or for all stock options. Google Executive Management Group (EMG) may not participate, and only employee stock options granted after our IPO are eligible. We should also note that we've discussed this program with the SEC and we'll ensure it complies with applicable securities laws.

We've chosen Morgan Stanley to manage the auction of these TSOs between our employees and the multiple bidders, and we are working with multiple financial institutions to participate as bidders in the auction. We expect to have this program up and running in the second quarter of 2007.

If you're wondering how this would work for employees, here is an example scenario. There's more about the related accounting here. And for answers to other questions, we've put together an extensive Q and A.

(You'll notice some legal language below, and at the bottom of all the related information we link to. We're including that because we will file a registration statement with the SEC as a requirement of offering this program, and we want to help you find all of the information related to this registration statement.)

Google may file a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the SEC for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Google has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Google and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC Web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, Google will arrange to send you the prospectus after filing if you request it by calling toll-free 1-866-468-4664 or sending an e-mail to investors@google.com.

Opening up the Google Web Toolkit

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is all about making the web a better place by making it easier to create web apps like Gmail or Google Maps. So today, we're excited to tell you that we're releasing all the source code for GWT under an open source license. We've been working hard to build great tools for AJAX development, and now we're happy to begin working with the open source community towards the same goal. The folks who are passionate about AJAX can contribute to the project and make this toolkit even better.

If you're curious about how to add some AJAX goodness to your site, see if the Google Web Toolkit is right for you.

There's more to Google Finance

Posted by Vivi Costache, Software Engineer, Google Finance team

The Google Finance team has been working hard since we launched 6 months ago. Here's a short animation describing what's been keeping us busy. Just in case your sound is off (and we don't have subtitles :-) ), here's what's new:

• A new homepage design which lets you see currency information, sector performance for the U.S. market, and a listing of top market movers along with the relevant and important news of the day.
• A Top Movers section highlighting most active companies by price, market cap, volume, and popularity as determined by our own Google Trends.
• More comprehensive charts, which now display up to 40 years of data for U.S. stocks.
• Richer portfolio capabilities that let you import other online portfolios to Google Finance, use different views and add transactions to make it easier to track your investments.
• A quick and easy way to add and view your Google Finance portfolios on the Google Personalized Homepage.

So check out the new features on Google Finance, and let us know what you think.

Opening my eyes to a whole new world

Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth team

Every once in a while you come across a piece of technology that instantly grabs you and you can't stop saying "Oh my god!" When I bought my 12" Mac Powerbook, for instance, just opening the box was an experience. Each item was laid out perfectly -- everything I pulled out was well designed from the power connector with the glowing ring to the pulsating light next to the latch that made it look like it was breathing.

I recently went to the Tech Museum Awards, and one of the laureates, Mohammed Bah Abba, had created a refrigerator that requires no electricity -- basically uses two clay pots with wet sand in between them. This device helped keep food fresh longer in poor rural areas in Africa. And the group FogQuest uses these big meshes that collected potable water from fog (yes, the white stuff that hangs around in the air) for people in Central and South America. Simple, elegant technologies that have a huge impact to help with basic human needs.

Due in large part to the community of people who use Google Earth, it has also become one of those technologies. Having worked on it for almost 7 years, you would think the magic would have worn off for me by now, but amazingly enough, it hasn't. Every once in a while we add a new feature -- and it's like I was looking at it for the first time. Hours pass by without me noticing.

The new Geographic Web layer we released today is one of those features. We've taken the rich data of Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community and made a browsable layer in Google Earth. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and see what people have written about it, photographed, or posted. I went hopping around from the southern tip of South America to the mosques in the Middle East to the Maldives Islands, immersed in a wealth of information, and I really felt like I was visiting each place through eyes of people who had been there. It was really engaging to compare, say, the Grand Canyon through the photos in Panoramio to the view from Google Earth, where I could follow the Colorado River through each.

To experience this for yourself, all you need to do is start Google Earth and explore the world. As of today you will see new icons -— the Wikipedia globe, the Panoramio star, or the information “i” of the Google Earth Community —- so just click on any of them to explore information about a place. You can also easily turn it off in the Layers panel on the lower left.

This is by far one of my most favorite layers we've ever done, and I really hope you enjoy it. To use our founding group's tagline, Happy travels!

Share your photos in more languages

Posted by Steve McKay, Software Engineer

Have you been waiting to share your photos on Picasa Web Albums in a language other than English? We don't want you waiting a minute longer, so today our team in Santa Monica is very happy to give you the ability to create web albums in 18 additional languages: English (UK), English (US), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish. If you've already got a Picasa Web Albums account in English, click the "Settings" link to change your language.

For the fastest and easiest uploading to Picasa Web Albums, get Picasa. If you don't use Windows or you have another photo management tool, use your browser to upload your pix. Either way, your photos will be easy to arrange in a clean, uncluttered web gallery where you can add captions and share them. Take a look at our test gallery to see what it looks like.

The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Posted by Meredith Carroll, Staffing Programs Coordinator

Dr. Anita Borg (1949-2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. As part of our ongoing commitment to Anita’s vision, we're pleased to announce the 2007 Google Anita Borg Scholarship. A group of women undergraduate and graduate students studying in the U.S. will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year. The selected scholars will also be invited to attend an all-expenses paid trip to our Mountain View headquarters.

Tell your friends or apply yourself – the deadline for U.S. applications is Monday, January 15, 2007.

And this year, we're also pleased to expand the scholarship program to women students in Europe. These recipients will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year, and are invited to a retreat at the Google office in Zurich, Switzerland. Applications for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship are due Friday, January 12, 2007.

We hope this program will encourage students to excel in their studies, inspire them to become role models and leaders, and help remove the financial barriers for women wishing to pursue an engineering degree. Here's a bit of testimony from two Anita Borg Scholars who have since joined us:

"I remember mailing in my application by FedEx overnight because I had decided to apply at the last minute and I really didn't think I had much of a chance. I'm glad I applied because through the scholarship, I met some amazing women who became good friends of mine. I got a chance to go to the Grace Hopper conference for Women in Computer Science and probably the most important thing I learned from the experience is nothing ventured, nothing gained."

-- Rose Yao, Associate Product Manager, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar

"One of the greatest things about the scholarship is the opportunity to meet other women and form a network -- I have kept in touch a lot of the other women that received the scholarship the same year and over the last 2 years this has been invaluable to me. These are women I can rely on and even though we don't see each other frequently, the bond we formed is strong."

-- Gaby Aguilera, Software Engineer-Testing, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar

Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP

As I indicated in my post last week, I've been interested in the issue of health care and health information for a while. I just spoke at a conference about some of the challenges in the health care system that we at Google want to tackle. The conference, called Connecting Americans to Their Health Care, is a gathering focused on how consumers are transforming health care through the use of personal health technologies.

This speech will give you some insight into the problems that we believe need our attention. There are, of course, other challenges in health care that we plan to work on, and we'll share more information with you about the solutions we're trying to develop as this work advances.

Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development

When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for XMPP federation, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard.

Today, we're excited that IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability.

It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on LiveJournal, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!

Wizardy

Ok, technically not a Free game nor really a game, but the damn thing is almost always right. Almost freaky. Try this little flash game, Wizardy:

http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html

Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

In the information age, currency of information has high value. As someone who cannot see, I find having to skim many different news sites to stay caught up even more difficult than the average web user. As in most things, off-loading some of this work to the machine is the answer, and what better machine to offload the work to than Google News.

In addition, finding relevant news stories through Google News helps me navigate directly to the news story on the originating site. Even if the originating news site is itself visually complex, Google has done most of the hard work of surfing that site and getting me to the content I need to read. Combined with Google News finding and grouping related stories on a given topic, this is an especially effective way of staying informed.

Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (Google Reader). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on XForms. For topics on my watch list I create Google News alerts. In addition, Google News provides feeds (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader.

Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that Google News also provides a Mobile version that is very speech-friendly. For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the Google wireless transcoder so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud.

Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager

Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a tailspin trying to figure out what to do next. My friends and I considered the usual options: grad school, i-banking, gigs with tech companies and consulting firms. And then there was Teach for America (TFA), an organization dedicated to eradicating educational inequity by enlisting thousands of elite college grads to teach in under-resourced schools. I joined TFA in 1995 and went from college student to inner-city first grade teacher (of 36 students!) practically overnight. Teaching was, without a doubt, the most challenging and the most rewarding job I have ever had.

TFA continues to be a popular destination for college grads today. Since the mid-90s, its enrollment has more than tripled and its applicant pool has quadrupled. As a Googler and former TFA'er, I was thrilled to hear that Google is partnering with TFA to provide two-year deferrals for students who receive offers from both institutions. Now bright, idealistic college grads don't have to choose between two exciting and worthwhile career opportunities. Our partnership enables college grads to get real-world experience and to bring the insight and experience they gain in the classroom to bear in their work at Google. By joining forces, Google and TFA will be able to attract individuals who are capable of the hard work, commitment, and creativity it takes to teach and to be a Googler.

Visit www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica to find out more about this great program.

Update: Corrected author attribution.

It's A Graveyard Out There

Jono Bacon, a Gnome developer, gives an insight into just why Flightgear is so damn cool.

The SuperTuxKart team is looking at another release in the near future with an improved UI and lots of bug fixes.

The 3rd release candidate for Wesnoth 1.2 has been released (changelog). It has "important bugfixes" but is otherwise basically Wesnoth 1.2 and is a solid and impressive game.

And finally a new game! Stephen Carlyle-Smith wrote to me to introduce Nuclear Graveyard:

I'd just like to tell you about a new free game that I've written which hopefully you will mention on your Freegamer blog. It's a fork of the old Laser Squad 3D code, and it's called Nuclear Graveyard. It's a persistent 3D squad-based realtime strategy game. Basically, players can connect and control the units, and either play against each other or against the CPU. The homepage is at http://ngrave.pbwiki.com/. At the moment the graphics are a bit basic, as I'm no 3D artist, but the game is completely finished and playable. As it's new, its community is very small, but I'm hoping it will get bigger as people discover it.

I could not find a link for Laser Squad 3D.

Seeing RED

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP

You might have noticed from our homepage that today is World AIDS Day. We want to remember all those who have suffered from HIV/AIDS in the 25 years since it was first identified, and we want to support everyone working to eradicate this scourge: Today, there are about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and it is increasing in every region in the world. In Africa, it is the leading cause of death -- 5,500 Africans die each day from this insidious disease.

One effort that is making a difference is (RED), a company founded this year by Bono and Bobby Shriver. A percentage of the profits from each (RED) product sold is given to The Global Fund. We are supporting the (RED) effort by offering promotional support to (RED) and (RED) products on Google properties throughout the holiday season.

We hope you choose to support them with your purchases. Companies offering (RED) products have committed to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of that product into Global Fund-financed AIDS programmes in Africa.

Together, let's make a big difference. Read more at JoinRED.com or visit the (RED) blog.

Health care information matters

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President

At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:

• What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms
• Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her
• Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred

Once she had a correct diagnosis and we'd found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.

In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the Google Co-op platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.

This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs.

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.

These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you. Read through our Help Center information and let us hear from you.

Update: New contact link.

Railroad Tycoon now Freeware

The original Railroad Tycoon has been released as freeware. Download it from 2kgames.com who seem to be the official handlers of the freeware RT.

JFreeRails

Still, freeware is not open source. There are GPL clones of RT. The two most notable ones are Railz and JFreeRails. Indeed JFreeRails got updated as recently as September this year. Railz seems to have stalled with it's development.

Then there is of course the other rail game implementations, notably OpenTTD. There are lots of promising noises coming out of the OpenTTD camp and the hires graphics seem to be coming out of the community at a steady pace. I'm very hopeful that we will see a hires release in 2007 that should be a superb game and herald a new era for OpenTTD.

A game that already has hires graphics and is free, albeit only freeware, is Simutrans. The development is relentless and the latest release looks very nice. For some reason I have never found Simutrans as much fun as OpenTTD but then I grew up with the original Transport Tycoon.

Revisions and publishing features in spreadsheets

Posted by Micah Lemonik, Software Engineer

Running out for ice cream and cookies at 2 a.m. was just a cliché to me -- until I found myself trying to find an all night grocery store which had these things for my pregnant wife, Marla. Then there were the nights she didn't know what she wanted, but if she didn't get it now, things would get ugly.

How did a Google spreadsheet help with pregnant-lady-cravings? She and I started a list of every food she'd ever craved and when, and, using the sharing and collaboration features, we were able to create a spreadsheet that helped me learn what foods were best to keep on hand in bulk for those midnight feedings. We could even keep an inventory so I'd know to stop off at the grocery store on my way home if we were low on vanilla ice cream, cookies or peanut butter.

My wife isn't the only one making requests at 2 a.m. Lots of you are sending in lots of requests for features at all hours of the day and night. Two new ones launched today are revisions and and publishing. Revisions will enable you to go back to previous versions of your spreadsheet; publishing will give you a URL for your spreadsheets which you can share with anyone -- even as a link on another site or in your blog. The spreadsheet can still be updated from within Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

We've got some other cool new features too, so check them out at docs.google.com,and if you have other "crazy" ideas, feel free to make suggestions, discuss them with others, or visit the Help Center. Whatever you do, please don't ask for ice cream at 2 a.m.!

Adieu to Google Answers

Posted by Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, Software Engineers

Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.

Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire.

The people who participated in Google Answers -- more than 800 of them over the years -- are a passionate group committed to helping people find the information they need, and we applaud them for sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote in.

If you have a chance, we encourage you to browse through the questions posted over the last 4+ years. Although we won't be accepting any new questions, the existing Qs and As are available. We'll stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the year.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

Audio captchas when visual images are unusable

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Wikipedia defines 'captcha' as an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" -- a word which is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. Most web users think of captchas as those hard to read distorted letters or images that one often is confronted by when websites attempt to verify that they're indeed talking to a live human. Google Accounts support captchas. Of course, bloggers (no matter which platform they use) can also use them to prevent comment spam.

Captchas were never intended to be purely visual -- however, most initial implementations used fuzzy images, and in attempting to lock out automated agents also inadvertently locked out people unable to see the image. As an alternative to these, this past spring Google Services that require verification began to provide an audio alternative -- people have the option of listening to a sequence of spoken digits that they then type into a form field to verify to the web application that there is indeed a live human at the other end.

To keep the audio captcha as challenging as the visual captcha when confronted by automated agents, we add some distortion to the spoken digits, and we're still experimenting with different distortion techniques to ease the burden on the genuine human user while locking out automated agents. We welcome feedback on the effectiveness of these techniques from you (we automatically collect feedback from those evil automated agents pretending to be human) :-).

You can easily spot the availability of audio captchas by the presence of the well-recognized "wheelchair" icon for accessibility --- the image is tagged with appropriate alt text to help blind users. Incidentally you don’t have to be visually impaired to use the audio captcha; if you are in a situation where you find it hard to view the visual captcha -- either because you're at a non-graphical display, or because the specific visual challenge we offered you turned out to be unusable in a given situation, feel free to give the audio captcha a try. We've worked hard to ensure that the audio captchas work on different hardware/software combinations, and you do not need any special hardware (or software) other than a sound card to be able to use them.

VDrift gets AI, Ecksdee update

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers. The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself!

Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video. Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

Update: Global Warming Speakout

Posted by Jen Mazzon, Google Docs & Spreadsheets Team

Hundreds of students from more than 20 countries recently brainstormed ideas on combating climate change -- and they did it online using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The kids had a blast coming up with solutions to address climate change, and we had a blast reading through their ideas and selecting the top 50 to feature on the Google Educators site. Then to top it off we took out out a full-page ad in today's edition of USA Today so the kids' great ideas would get noticed! Global collaboration has never been more fun and, when it comes to global warming, more necessary.

Pick up a copy of USA Today to see the full-page ad that credits the 80+ participating schools or click here to read all the "top 50" ideas. You'll definitely find an idea that you can act on.

Happy Cyber Monday

Posted by Tom Oliveri, Google Checkout team

You've heard of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when it seems everyone in the U.S. crowds into the malls to get an early start on the annual holiday shopping frenzy. But have you heard of Cyber Monday, the first workday after the long weekend -- in other words, today -- when we all sit down at our desks and start surfing our way to those perfect gifts?

According to a poll we recently commissioned from Harris Interactive, 40 percent of employed U.S. adults say they plan to do at least some of their online holiday shopping from work this year. So we aim to make all that pointing and clicking as fast, safe, and easy as possible. Shopping with Google Checkout means using one user name, password and account to make purchases from thousands of merchants. It means serious protection from online fraud. And this holiday season it also means a nice bonus for your gift-buying budget; as a small holiday gift to all Checkout shoppers, you'll receive $10 off purchases of $30 or more, or $20 off purchases of $50 or more, depending on the merchant.

And just in time for the holidays, we're also happy to announce a growing number of merchants who recently added Checkout to their sites, including Toys R Us, Babies R Us, Golfsmith, Linens 'n Things, PetCo, and J&R Music and Computer World.

So settle in, log on, answer a few work-related emails (so you won't feel too guilty), and jumpstart your shopping season with Checkout. Learn more about Google Checkout holiday offers here.

So Cal without cars?

Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager Transit

My previous trips to Southern California have required cars and involved a lot of traffic on the 405. Next time, however, I'll be using Google Transit to plan bus trips with Burbank Bus and the Orange County Transportation Authority. While they can't make the traffic disappear, I can relax as I travel between my favorite beaches or maybe from Bob Hope Airport to beautiful downtown Burbank.

The interest in open sharing and standards for transit data is growing. If you'd like your city to be a part of Google Transit, email us at labs-transit_content@google.com.

A new way to browse books

Posted by Nathan Naze, Software Engineer

As a kid, I was a bit of a fixture at my hometown library. My mom and I would visit frequently and the librarians knew me by name. It's only fitting that now, decades later, I work as an engineer for Google Book Search, Google's project to make the world's books searchable, just like the web.

My latest assignment has been to help develop a better way to browse our digitized books on a computer screen. I've always had an interest in cutting-edge web applications — existing Google products such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets make heavy use of JavaScript and DHTML to create full-featured applications in a web browser that you can use without having to download and install anything.

In an effort to make online book reading easier, we've given our product the same treatment. I'm tremendously excited to announce the first fruits of these efforts. Here's a quick tour of some of the changes:

• Zoom in on text and images. Here's a cool full-page sketch of a ship from an 1898 book on steam navigation. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this colorful page of a room from a book on interior design. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the and buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.


• One book, one web page. No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For full-view books, there's also a two-page mode () in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for two-page images). In both modes, you'll be able to use and to turn pages.


• Scroll, scroll, scroll your book… using the scrollbar or your mouse wheel, or by dragging (in most browsers, you'll see a ). You can also use the keyboard (try the spacebar, page up, page down, and the arrow keys). Or you can click on a link in the table of contents or your search results to jump right to that page (like this photo from the 1906 book Geronimo's Story of His Life).


• This page was made for reading. We've tried to tidy up the clutter to leave as much room as possible for what's important — the book. We've put all the information about the book in a scrollable side menu. Still not enough room? You can put the screen in fullscreen mode with , so you can use the whole window for browsing. Try it with a nice illustrated book of Celtic fairy tales or, for some lighter reading, electromagnetic wave theory.


• More on this (and other) books. Find other books that interest you. Just click on "About this book" to find more books related to the book you're reading. If the book How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains interests you, you'll probably like Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1. We also revised our "About this book" page to provide better information for in-copyright books, from which you can just see short snippets or a limited preview.


• Explore citations and references. You can also find other books that refer to your book of interest. If scholarly works from Google Scholar have references to the book, you'll see them too. As an example, see what other works have referred to Aristotle's works or the 1922 book All About Coffee.

So check out the new Google Book Search. We hope it'll help you find new (and old) books that interest you. Try it out, and let us know what you think.

And now, Google News sitemaps

Posted by Nathan Stoll, Product Manager, Google News

As the product manager for Google News, I meet with news editors and managers around the world. Wherever I go, one thing publishers tell me consistently is that they want greater control and visibility into the process by which their content gets included in Google News. It's been a longtime goal of ours to offer flexibility to publishers as we help them grow their online publications, so I’m pleased to tell you that we're adding Google News support within Google webmaster tools.

Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds -- or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles -- to tell us exactly which articles they'd like us to crawl. While they've always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.

We also want to provide content owners more visibility into which articles are ultimately included in Google News, so we're now offering error reports specific to Google News. These error reports will explain any problems we experienced crawling or extracting news articles from a publisher's site. Although we try to make our crawl and analysis as comprehensive as possible, there are always a small number of sites and articles that we're not able to correctly analyze and include. We hope these new tools will help publishers resolve such issues.

Webmaster tools also offer publishers detailed information on the types of queries that lead visitors to various pages on a website, which can be helpful for understanding user information needs and access patterns.

We plan to extend webmaster tools for Google News to additional languages soon.

There's more information about the new tools on our Webmaster Central blog. We hope you find these new tools helpful, and look forward to your feedback.

Simplicity and power

Posted by Justin Rosenstein, Product Manager

When we launched Google Page Creator on Labs earlier this year, we had one overriding goal: take making a website -- traditionally a complex process involving HTML, CSS, FTP, and $$$ -- and make it drop-dead easy. Since then, the feedback we're received has been loud and clear: thank you for making simple web publishing simple; now, go make more powerful things possible.

So we've spent the last six months in our shiny white lab coats (er, T-shirts) working on adding power to Google Page Creator without adding much complexity -- and we've just added three new goodies today:

Image editing (see image): Now you can make a picture look just right in the context of your web page. Once you add a picture, crop, rotate, lighten, darken, and add crazy special effects to it right from within your browser.

Multiple sites: When you first sign in to Google Page Creator, we automatically give you a site with the same name as your Gmail address, so you don't have to worry about choosing a name when you're just trying to get started. But because not every site is a personal site, starting today, you can create up to five sites with different URLs. For example, you can have justinspizza.googlepages.com in addition to justin.rosenstein.googlepages.com.

Pages for mobile: This feature has an awesome power-to-complexity ratio: Now, every Google Page Creator site automatically has a mobile edition. So when people visit your site from their mobile browser, they will see it optimized for their particular phone.

Of course, we're only getting started. Let us know how we can make Google Page Creator powerful enough for your web site publishing needs.

Viewing the web through a mobile lens

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Designed for cell phone users, I find the Google web transcoder has become an indispensable tool for me when I'm confronted with complex web pages. In fact when one searches the web using mobile phones, Google search hits often get redirected to go through the transcoder in order to provide the mobile user with a web page that works on small displays.

It turns out that much of the visual complexity that creates stumbling blocks for mobile users also become show-stoppers when it comes to listening to a web page using screenreaders. So the transcoder has become a useful part of my web access arsenal. You can reach it at google.com/m. From there, search for your favorite site. Think of it as the equivalent of your browser's address bar. Once you access a website through the this interface, any links you follow from that page will be automatically transcoded.

UFO:AI 2.0rc6

UFO:AI 2.0rc6 is out (changelog). "This release candidate should really be the final one for the 2.0 series." With working reaction-fire, an isometric view, and a host of fixes, UFO:AI has emerged as a polished open source game. "We are already working hard on the next major release - the 2.1 tree - which will include a full storyline." Awesome!

Google Base turns 1

Posted by Bindu Reddy, Product Manager, Google Base

On its first anniversary, we're recapping what Google Base has accomplished on the Base blog.

It's the little things in Gmail

Posted by Mike Sego, Gmail Engineer

When people write articles about Gmail, they usually focus on the big stuff, like how we offer 2.7+ gigs of free storage. But I've actually found that some of the smallest features we've launched have made just as big of a difference, at least to me and the way I use email.

For starters, Gmail has helped eliminate a bunch of duplicate replies that I used to get in mailing lists. You know how a lot of times someone will email a list and get a bunch of responses from different people that all say roughly the same thing? Last week, we added a feature where if I'm a reading an email conversation, or replying to one, and someone else replies to the same email, a notification pops up telling me there's a new message. Then I just click a link and Gmail adds the message to the conversation. This is also great because it means I don’t end up being embarrassed by responding to a list just as someone else is sending a response that’s way better.

There are a few other gems that have made email just work better for me: viewing attachments in HTML instead of downloading all of them; replying by chat rather than email when I need a quick answer; and the ability to chat with someone even when they're offline, and have those chats show up in their inbox when they sign in again.

These smaller features never get as much attention as the big ones, but I think they deserve it. They've changed the way I email, and made me grateful to the people who spend the time to get the little things right.

Enterprise search superstars

Posted by Kevin Gough, Enterprise Team


Want your very own custom-made robot crafted out of Legos?

These robots are part of the awards package that we're giving our new Google Enterprise Search Superstars. This awards program recognizes companies, and the individuals involved, with innovative enterprise search implementations and a relentless focus on users that yields business results.

Our initial winners used the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance, our website and corporate network search appliances, to create self-service support sites that reduced customer support costs, quickly identify domain experts in their organization, and improve service for international users. Read their stories and find out how to become the next Superstar.

Spreading the AJAX love

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

You may have heard that the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes AJAX development easier, but now we've made it even easier to dive into AJAX. GWT 1.2 supports development on Mac OS X. While GWT has always supported targeting a wide variety of web browsers and production systems, with today's announcement, GWT fanatics are now free to develop on the operating system of their choice.

So if you or a friend have an ambitious web application in mind -- especially if you're already familiar with Java development -- feel the AJAX love: check out GWT.

Click to call in Google Maps

Posted by Min Zeng, Google Maps team

Last week, I was trying to buy blue lightbulbs for a party at my house, and I ended up calling ten different stores before I found one that carried them. Now with the new calling feature on Google Maps, I can do this quickly and easily, and never have to lift a finger to dial.

Here's how it works: Search for a business, like a hardware store, on Google Maps, and click the 'call' link next to its phone number. Then, enter your phone number and click 'Connect For free.' Google calls your phone number and automatically connects you to the hardware store.

There are two things that I really like about this. The business's phone number is automatically stored in your caller ID so you can easily call back in the future. And by checking the box to remember your phone number, you can make future calls from Google Maps with just two mouse clicks (and picking up your phone, of course).

We're providing the 'call' link as a free service to all businesses. These aren't ads and don't influence the ranking of businesses in the search results. We foot the bill for calls (local and long distance), but airtime fees or other mobile fees will still apply if you use a mobile phone number. Currently, the calling feature works if you live in the U.S. and are looking for a business located in the U.S.

Learn more about this, and also our privacy policy.

Update: Added link to "hardware store" example.

Search engines united

Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager

Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license in the hopes that other search engines would adopt the protocol too. And today, we're excited to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As the web becomes more dynamic, Sitemaps will enable better and fresher search results for everyone who uses the web. For site owners, Sitemaps will help improve website visibility in search results. You can read more about this on our Webmaster Central blog.

Google News in Scandinavia

Posted by Petter Wedum and Håvard Husevåg Garnes, Google interns

After months of hard work, the day is finally here: we've released Google News in Norway and Sweden.

At Google News, we cut to the bone -- er, to the core -- searching to get you the freshest takes. We gather the latest news headlines in your language and present a summary of links to you in one single page, freshly ranked by relevance and popularity. Then you just dash off to the sites to read the news stories that take your fancy.

The two of us worked as summer interns with Google in Trondheim earlier this year, with plenty of help from our Swedish colleague Jonas Yngvesson, who's based in Google's Zurich office. Now after some months of public silence, we can finally tell our friends and you all about our work on Google News Scandinavia. It has kind of become our baby. We've cared for it, looked after it, yelled at it and corrected it, and we've come to love it. We hope you will appreciate it as much as we do.

In addition to taming the news, we've enjoyed free lunches and had a chance to learn from some of the best engineers Trondheim and the rest of the world have to offer. Perhaps best of all, we were trusted to work on release-level code for Norway and Sweden. If like us you want to have a say in the inner workings of the world's biggest search company -- to discuss algorithm problems with the guy who wrote your algorithm textbook at college -- you should know that Google wants interns all over the world. Check out the Google Interns site.

Before we go, we would like to thank all the Googlers who have helped us and encouraged us and cared for us throughout our internship. Bosses, colleagues, recruiters and caterers, thank you! Our summer would not have been the same without your help.

Search Public Events in Google Calendar

Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager

Today we launched a new feature of Google Calendar: "Search public events." It lets you search over public events added by others using Calendar and also events we've added by working with partners to provide movie listings, concerts, and all sorts of other fun events.

There are many reasons we wanted to build this feature, but mainly because some of us on the team moved to New York last year to work in our office there. Needless to say, we wanted to experience everything that the city had to offer but had trouble finding all the fun and fascination that New York has to offer. After Google Calendar launched in April, we saw a surge in the number of public calendars being shared. We thought if we made public events searchable, we could find interesting events with little effort by encouraging people to share interesting events.

So whether you're interested in broadway, movies, art, music, photography, farmer's markets, Knicks basketball (we love 'em in NY) or even good old dumpster diving, we hope you find this new feature useful. If you don't see your favorite event, add it to a public calendar and share it with the world. And while you're finding new and interesting things to do, please send us feedback on other ways we can improve the service.

Desktop refreshed

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Every once in a while, our products go through a change that we just can't wait to get out to you. That's the case with Google Desktop 4.5, which introduces a visual refresh of the Sidebar and some Google Gadgets. The cleaner and now transparent Sidebar integrates more seamlessly into your desktop environment while still providing convenient, at-a-glance access to all sorts of personalized information. This version is also compatible with the latest software such as Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and Mozilla Firefox 2.0. There are more details on the Google Desktop Blog.