Saturday, December 12, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] Tis the Season to be Merry and Mobile

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 10:50 PM PST

Official Google Mobile Blog: Tis the Season to be Merry and Mobile

Holiday season is in full swing (again). And we want to help you take advantage of everything your mobile device can offer to help deck the halls or hit the malls. If you're like us, you'll probably use your phone to research products and check out reviews, locate stores, purchase gifts, or capture holiday memories with a photo or video. In fact, a recent study estimates that 19% of consumers will use their phone for holiday shopping research, coupons, or purchases (a number that's likely much higher for our mobile-savvy blog readers). So we've posted a 'Holiday Help' section in our Mobile Help Center to share tips and tricks for using Google's mobile products during the holidays. Take a peek if you want to learn some new tips and tricks to help you get through the season. Happy holidays!



Posted by Robin Norvell, Consumer Operations elf
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/12/tis-season-to-be-merry-and-mobile.html

[G] Upgrade to a Google Number

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 08:58 PM PST

Google Voice Blog: Upgrade to a Google Number

A few weeks ago we launched the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number. This option gives you all the voicemail features of Google Voice, like transcriptions and email/SMS notifications, without needing to ask people to call you on a new number.

But once you've dipped your toes in the water, you may decide you'd like more of the features that come with a Google number, like call screening, SMS via email, and custom ring schedules.

Today we're announcing that if you've been using Google Voice with your existing number, you can now upgrade your account, pick a new Google Voice number, and start taking advantage of the full Google Voice feature set.

To do this, click "Settings" and look for a link to "Get a Google Number" next to your voicemail access number.


Once you've upgraded, you can reactivate Google Voice for your cell phone's voicemail. This will let you continue accessing all your voicemails in a single place, whether someone calls your Google Voice number or your underlying cell phone.

Posted by Ilya Frank, Senior Software Engineer
URL: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/few-weeks-ago-we-launched-ability-to.html

[G] Upgrade to a Google Number

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 06:15 PM PST

Google Voice Blog: Upgrade to a Google Number

A few weeks ago we launched the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number. This option gives you all the voicemail features of Google Voice, like transcriptions and email/SMS notifications, without needing to ask people to call you on a new number.

But once you've dipped your toes in the water, you may decide you'd like more of the features that come with a Google number, like the ability to get your calls on multiple phones, call screening, SMS via email, and custom ring schedules.

Today we're announcing that if you've been using Google Voice with your existing number, you can now upgrade your account, pick a new Google Voice number, and start taking advantage of the full Google Voice feature set.

To do this, click "Settings" and look for a link to "Get a Google Number" next to your voicemail access number.


Once you've upgraded, you can reactivate Google Voice for your cell phone's voicemail. This will let you continue accessing all your voicemails in a single place, whether someone calls your Google Voice number or your underlying cell phone.

Posted by Ilya Frank, Software Engineer
URL: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/upgrade-to-google-number.html

[G] This week in search 12/11/09

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST

Official Google Blog: This week in search 12/11/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

What a busy week for Google! From the launch of real time, to the addition of universal search features in Suggest, searching on Google just got a whole lot better this week.

Real-time search
Want to know what people are saying about [google chrome] right now? Or maybe you're wondering if things can get any worse for [tiger]? With Google's real-time search, you can find out what's happening right now. Once you've entered a query, you can also click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" in the Search Options menu for a full page of the latest web, blogs, news and updates. You can also restrict your results to "Updates" mode which shows only short form content from our partners that we announced on Monday, which will include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. Finally, you can also check out the common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time by going to the "Hot Topics" section in Google Trends. Real-time search is live worldwide in English, and is available on mobile too from google.com and google.com/trends on Android and iPhone.

Check out the video from our real-time search announcement here.

Universal search features in Suggest
Google Suggest learned a new trick this week, or rather 10 of them. To save time and keystrokes, we now show universal search features in Suggest for a range of straightforward questions, including ones for: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, unit conversions, and currency conversions. So the next time you start searching on Google for [weather in wichita], the [alaska area code], or look to [define dichotomy], chances are you won't even need to hit enter to see the answer. Though these features are available for Google.com users in English so far, we're working hard to expand them to our international users.

Google Similar Pages beta on the Chrome extensions gallery
Ever find yourself enjoying the webpage you're looking at, but curious to discover other pages similar to it? Or trying to find more pages about a topic, but struggling to come up with the right query? We certainly do, which is why we're excited to introduce the Google Similar Pages beta Chrome extension to help do just that. We use the same data for this as for the "Similar" link you see next to web search results, which you may have seen next to the Cached link for many web search results. But this Chrome extension is portable -- so you can use it to see similar page wherever you are on the web, not just on the Google search results page.

Quick Scroll on the Chrome extensions gallery
This week we released a Chrome extension called Google Quick Scroll. Once installed, this tool lets you use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page. For some queries, after you click on a result and the page you're visiting is done loading, the Quick Scroll panel will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. The panel highlights the most relevant content on the page, based on what you just searched for on google.com. Clicking one of the bits of text in the panel will scroll you directly to that part of the page. This should save you from scrolling around or using Control-F to manually hunt for the relevant content on the page. The Quick Scroll panel won't appear for all queries or results; it'll only pop up when we think that relevant content for your search is buried down the page or hard to find.

After you've installed the tool, try these example queries and results:
[does flap of butterfly wings affect weather] - click on result from en.wikipedia.org
[visiting berber villages in morocco] - click on result from www.gonomad.com
[evidence universe expands and contracts] - click on result from www4.ncsu.edu

Google Quick Scroll, like all extensions, requires the Beta version of Chrome 4, and can be installed from the Chrome Extensions Gallery here.

More Transit information in search results
We know a lot of people rely on public transit to get where they're going, and we want to make it even easier for you to find the right stop for your travels. Starting this week, when you search for local businesses in cities where public transit is popular, we'll show you nearby public transit stops in the map appearing at the top of your results. For example, if you wanted to visit [heidelberg nyc], we now show you that it's near the 86th Street station. If you were in Germany, you might want to take the tram to the National Theater stop for [hofbrauhaus munich]. Clicking on the station name will take you to Google Maps with your query and the transit stop highlighted, so that you can easily get full directions.

Stay tuned for more great posts for the remainder of 2009!

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-week-in-search-121109.html

[G] Introducing namebench

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Introducing namebench

Slow DNS servers can make for a terrible web browsing experience, but knowing which one to use isn't easy. namebench is a new open source tool that helps to take the guess-work out of the DNS server selection process. namebench benchmarks available DNS services and provides a personalized comparison to show you which name servers perform the best. As a System Administrator at Google, I was curious about measuring how BGP route selection affected the performance of Google Public DNS. This curiosity resulted in writing a small benchmarking script, which was further developed during my 20% time to become a full-featured application for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.



namebench is covered by the Apache 2.0 license, and was made possible by using several other great open-source tools including Python, Tkinter, PyObjC, dnspython, jinja2 and graphy. It also makes use of the Google Chart API to visualize the results:



In order to provide the most relevant results, namebench employs a number of interesting techniques. First, it personalizes the benchmark by making use of your browser history to see what hosts to benchmark with. It also determines cache-sharing relationships between different IP's and removes the slowest of these servers to avoid improperly benchmarking them solely on cached results. namebench will also report on DNS misbehavior such as DNS hijacking and censorship.

namebench 1.0 is available for download now. If you would like to discuss or have any questions namebench, please join the namebench mailing list. Happy hacking!

By Thomas Strömberg, Hardware Operations Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-namebench.html

[G] Ad policies — the year in review

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 03:22 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Ad policies — the year in review

We've always said that a top priority for us is making sure that your search results are relevant, useful and safe. Of course, this commitment to a positive search experience extends to the ads you see on Google too. Earlier this week we took a stand to fight Internet scams, and in recent months, we've also put a new procedure in place to eradicate "scammy" ads. But that's not all we've done in the past year to help you get the best possible information from our ads.

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses running ads through our AdWords system, you can imagine that reviewing all the ads is no easy feat! That's why we have both automated and manual ways to check them, and advertising policies meant to ensure that the ads you see on Google — and on partner sites that show our ads — are appropriate, fair, consistent and of the highest quality. We regularly review and update our guidelines to make sure they continue to provide the best user experience. Here's a recap of the improvements we've made in 2009.

Making sure the ads work
When you click on an ad for a holiday gift basket, you probably want to go directly to a website with gift basket choices. That's why we have link policies to ensure that the URLs in our ads actually get you to the sites you want to visit. For example, our updated Display URL policy helps advertisers better organize the URLs in their AdWords campaigns to make sure that when you click on an ad for gift baskets, a webpage with gift baskets is exactly where you go.

Making sure the ads are legitimate
To protect you from unsavory online entities that hope to victimize folks, we've shared tips to help you avoid falling for scams that sound too good to be true, and have taken recent legal action against fraudulent online schemes. To make sure that the ads are safe, we've also increased our efforts to detect scam ads and remove them from our system. For example, we've recently implemented a new process for permanently disabling AdWords accounts that attempt to harm users by doing things like installing malware on your computer, or offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees. This practice better protects users and is even stricter than our previous process of disapproving scam ads and disabling their domains. We're now trying to proactively prevent suspicious characters from creating new accounts with us regardless of their websites.

Making sure the ads are appropriate
We try to make sure that the ads you see aren't obtrusive, inappropriate or offensive. Our editorial policies help verify that ads meet basic grammar, spelling and composition rules. For example, we don't allow excessive punctuation or capitalization, because it would be really annoying if all ads were littered with lots of exclamation points or used all caps for their messages.

Our content policies make sure that the types of things offered in ads are appropriate. There are some things we don't allow because they are not legal in many countries — like child pornography and drugs — and other things we don't allow because they're offensive and considered socially unacceptable. To help us figure out where to draw these lines, we consider factors such as legal regulations, public sentiment and general codes of ethics and values.

Our commitment to appropriate ads also applies to the sites we accept to our AdSense program. We want website owners who have news and shopping-related information on their sites to be able to show you relevant ads. But we don't like sites that do inappropriate things, like repurpose copyrighted material without permission or automatically initiate unwanted downloads. To protect users and ensure we work with good sites, we take a look at website content and practices in accordance with our AdSense policies, and don't allow sites that violate the policies in the program. We act quickly to weed out the non-compliant sites so that someone who's looking online at sites that, for example, have illegal content like child porn or engage in shady invalid click activity won't see ads from Google there.

As new issues crop up, we revisit our content policies to make sure they're comprehensive and help to show you the best ads we can. Over this year, for instance, we've updated our global alcohol policy and U.S. trademark policy to give you additional relevant ad options. You can find more information about these changes and all our other policies on our Advertising Policies page.

To make good on our promise to show you ads and sites that help you find what you want, we enforce our advertising policies in both automated and manual ways. These are rules that aren't meant to be broken, so when we discover violations, we stop any offending ads from running. We also encourage users who've had a poor experience with an ad to report it, so we can look into it and take any necessary action.

While we've done a lot in 2009 to make ads better and more useful, we recognize that our systems aren't always perfect. We'll continue to work hard in 2010 to show you only the most relevant, high quality and safe ads possible.

Posted by Alana Karen, Director, Online Sales and Operations
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/ad-policies-year-in-review.html

[G] Optimize your campaigns for mobile in time for the holidays

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 02:21 PM PST

Inside AdWords: Optimize your campaigns for mobile in time for the holidays

Shoppers increasingly use their smartphones to search the internet, and we typically see an increase in shopping-related queries on Android, iPhone and Palm WebOS devices during the holiday season.


Ensure that your online campaigns perform well on mobile devices with full internet browsers by viewing device statistics on your Campaign Summary, Ad Groups, or Ads reports within AdWords. Just select the "Device" segment option under the "Filter and Views" drop down.


You can now compare clicks, impressions, CTR and other performance metrics for desktop vs. high-end mobile devices. Note that this data only dates back to June 3, 2009.


Now is the perfect time to optimize how you target consumers on-the-go. Here are a few best practices we think you'll find helpful:
  • Create separate campaigns and ad groups for your ads that appear on mobile devices. This makes it easier to customize ads, keywords and bids to optimize performance.
  • Put your call to action in a spot on your landing page that's easy to find. Keep in mind that it's a bit more difficult to navigate websites on a mobile device, so consider shortening your checkout process.
  • Most mobile phones don't support flash, so make sure your landing page is written in HTML and contains little or no Flash.
We hope these tips help you create great campaigns both for desktops and mobile devices this holiday season.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/12/optimize-your-campaigns-for-mobile-in.html

[G] Google Apps highlights – 12/11/2009

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 01:17 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Google Apps highlights – 12/11/2009

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We've been busy over the last three weeks adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Google Docs search improvements
In the past, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, presentation or PDF in your Google Docs list, the results were a set of exact matches arranged by "last modified date". Since Tuesday, we now provide personalized search results in Google Docs, sorted by relevancy — a combination of factors including whether you're an author on the document and if the file is explicitly shared with you. Search in Google Docs also supports stemming and synonyms now, so even if your search terms aren't quite exact, you can still find what you're looking for.


Offline Gmail graduates from Labs
After making many improvements to Offline Gmail since it first launched as a Labs feature (like the new ability to add attachments while offline), on Monday Offline Gmail graduated from Labs. Now it's easier to for Gmail users to enable offline access and adjust their preferences. Just to to the the "Offline" tab in Gmail's "Settings" area.

Picasa Web Albums connects with Eye-Fi
On Monday we announced a special offer to help you make even better use of our new overflow storage plans for photos and personal email. For a limited time, we'll send you a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) when you buy 200 GB of paid Google storage for $50. The Eye-Fi card offer lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer, right from your camera, no cables required!


Collaborative albums in Picasa
You've been able to collaboratively manage online albums in Picasa Web Albums together with friends and family since August, and on Tuesday we released an update so you can upload to collaborative albums directly from the Picasa software. From Picasa, you can also now manage the collaboration settings for your online photo collections.


Google Groups for businesses and schools
Also on Tuesday, we launched Google Groups for businesses and schools using Google Apps. Employees and students can now set up group aliases without taxing IT administrators for support, and group members can browse and search archives of messages sent to the alias. Group aliases also make it easier to share items like documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with a whole list of people at once, instead of adding recipients who should have access individually. You can watch an overview of what's new on YouTube.

Improvements to BlackBerry support for businesses and schools
Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server enables "push" email, contacts and calendar for BlackBerry devices. Two weeks ago, we added new functionality so businesses can support 500 BlackBerry devices per server — doubling the previous capacity. This lets businesses support fewer servers for BlackBerry users. We also added support for BlackBerry Professional Software, which is used by smaller companies to support up to 30 BlackBerry devices.

Who's gone Google?
I'm happy to offer a warm welcome to Mattson Technology, LCC International Inc., Fresno State University, The University of Delaware, St. Joseph's College and the thousands of other businesses and schools that made the switch to Google Apps in the last few weeks!

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-apps-highlights-12112009.html

[G] The Motor City goes 3D

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 12:13 PM PST

Google LatLong: The Motor City goes 3D

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]

A few of us on the SketchUp team either have roots in Detroit or grew up there, so we're especially happy to announce that Detroit, Michigan as been added in 3D to Google Earth. From sports venues like Joe Louis Arena (home of the Red Wings) and Comerica Park (new home of the Tigers), to great watering holes and eateries, like The Old Shillelagh and the legendary Lafayette Coney Island - home of the world's best 2am coney dog - they are all there in 3D.



Being able to cruise through Detroit in 3D reminds us of how much history this great US city has. We're excited that users around the world will now be able to discover this city virtually, for themselves.


Posted by Chris Dizon and Steve Dapkus, Google SketchUp Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/motor-city-goes-3d.html

[G] Two new features enhance search beyond the results page

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 11:20 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Two new features enhance search beyond the results page

On Monday, when Amit Singhal introduced Google real-time search, he talked about bringing you information at the speed of light. But speed isn't just about the time it takes the results to load, or even the time it takes us to index new information — it's about the time it takes to get you the information you're looking for.

That's why this week we're making two more improvements to satisfy your information needs more quickly: we're adding universal search features to Google Suggest, and we've released a powerful new extension for Google Chrome called Google Quick Scroll. Both features are examples of ways we want to extend the power of Google search beyond the results page.

Universal search features in Google Suggest
Let's say you're planning a vacation to Belgium for the holidays. Most vacation planning includes many simple questions: What's the weather? Is my flight on time? How many euros can I get for $100? For a long time we've provided answers to these kind of questions in one simple place with universal search features on the results page. Building on the improvements we made to Google Suggest earlier this year, now we're adding these features to the list of suggested search terms beneath the search box.

For example, let's say you want to visit the capital of Belgium, but you can't remember what it is. Type "capital of belgiu" in the search box and you'll immediately find your answer (Brussels) before you're even done typing. Similarly, you can type, "weather brus" and quickly decide how much warm clothing to bring (a lot!).

This kind of information will appear in Suggest either above or below the suggested search terms for a variety of queries. For example, you can type "delta 140" to see the flight status. You can also quickly discover the current time, figure out how many Euros you'll get per dollar, or even brush up on metric conversions. In total, there are currently 10 universal search features available in Google Suggest: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions — and we plan to add additional features in the future.

Quick Scroll to the information you're looking for
Many queries aren't as simple as [weather brussels], so in addition to adding universal search features to Google Suggest, this week we released a new Google Chrome extension called Quick Scroll which enables you to use Google's search capabilities even after leaving our results page.

After clicking a result, most searchers end up scrolling around looking for the relevant sections of the page. You may have learned to use the find feature in your browser (Control-F on a PC or Command-F on a Mac) to search for specific words on the page. The browser find function is a useful tool, but it's limited to matching the exact words you type, and most people don't know about it. With Quick Scroll, the process of finding relevant content and scrolling to it happens automatically, as an extension of your Google search.

Continuing our prior example, let's say you've heard that, in Belgium, Belgian waffles are served by street vendors, but you want to be sure. You do a search for [belgian waffles served by street vendors?] and click on the first result. With Google Quick Scroll, a small black box appears in the lower right hand corner of the browser with a couple snippets of text from the page that might be relevant to your query. In this case one of the snippets says, "In Belgium, it is served warm by street vendors." Click on the text snippet and Quick Scroll will take you right to that part of the page with the relevant text highlighted.


Apparently, Belgian waffles are in fact served warm by street vendors (yum!). In the screen shot, you can see that the highlighted section doesn't include the exact phrase "belgian waffles served by street vendors," so in this case the browser find command wouldn't actually be able to take you to the information you're looking for. Like Google Search, Quick Scroll analyzes things like proximity, prominence and position of the words to identify the most relevant content. You can think of it like a personal assistant who reads webpages before you do and highlights the parts you might want to read. If several sections of the page have useful content, Quick Scroll will show you multiple text excerpts from different portions of the page and you can click on any of them to scroll to that spot.

To use Quick Scroll or any other Chrome extension, you need the beta version of Chrome 4. Once you have it, you can install Quick Scroll from the extensions gallery. Because it's not always needed, you may notice that Quick Scroll doesn't appear for every result. If Google detects that the entire page is relevant to your query, then there's no need to scroll to a specific section.

With universal search features in Google Suggest and Google Quick Scroll, we hope you save precious seconds for many of the searches you perform. As Amit said on Monday, "seconds matter."

Posted by Ruth Dhanaraj & Matias Pelenur, Software Engineers
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/two-new-features-enhance-search-beyond.html
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