Googland

[G] Videos of the 8.8 Earthquake in Chile and the Aftermath
[G] This week in search 2/28/10
[G] Pop Star Jesse McCartney Headlines Today's "Healthy" Video Volunteers Homepage

[G] Videos of the 8.8 Earthquake in Chile and the Aftermath

Posted: 28 Feb 2010 11:51 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Videos of the 8.8 Earthquake in Chile and the Aftermath

A massive earthquake measuring 8.8 on the richter scale shook Chile at 3:34 a.m. on Saturday morning, waking most people in the middle of the night. Buildings have been destroyed, hundreds were killed, and many remain missing.

Since then, we've seen videos documenting the earthquake and its aftermath pouring onto YouTube. News organizations have been covering the tragedy 24/7, and citizens who experienced the epic natural disaster are sharing their experience with the rest of the world through their own videos.

This video taken during the earthquake gives a sense of what it was like to jump out of bed in the dark as your surroundings shook for more than 90 seconds:

And here you can see some of the structural damage caused by the earthquake, as user edielv surveys his neighborhood the next morning:

To upload your own videos of the earthquake in Chile, visit the Google Crisis Response landing page.

For video updates on what's happening in Chile, be sure to check CitizenTube.

Olivia Ma, News & Politics Manager, recently watched "Quake survivors reunited."

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/NWZ7OQSH0eo/videos-of-88-earthquake-in-chile-and.html

[G] This week in search 2/28/10

Posted: 28 Feb 2010 10:44 PM PST

Official Google Blog: This week in search 2/28/10

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

This week, we had a number of exciting announcements:

Refine your searches by location
Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel. Say you're big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There's a good chance you're looking for information that's relevant to your region, city or even a city you're visiting on vacation. That's where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., "Berkeley") to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., "East Bay", "Oakland") but might not specifically mention the city in your search.

Example search: [bike stores] - Click on "Show options" to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you're in, the region or state. You can also select "Custom Location" and enter it directly.

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs
Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs, and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we're happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile.

This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We're excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think!

Facebook in real-time search
Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on "Show Options" and then "Latest" or "Updates."

Example search: [facebook]

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Director, Global Communications & Public Affairs

URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/this-week-in-search-22810.html

[G] Pop Star Jesse McCartney Headlines Today's "Healthy" Video Volunteers Homepage

Posted: 28 Feb 2010 05:35 AM PST

YouTube Blog: Pop Star Jesse McCartney Headlines Today's "Healthy" Video Volunteers Homepage

Our Video Volunteers homepage lineup today features videos about nonprofits tackling important health issues: artist Jesse McCartney thanks you for standing up to cancer; themike99 tells a personal story about the tie between mercury poisoning and kidney failure; BangPopLA champions Whole Child LA and their work to help kids with chronic pain; and themattieboosh offers this animated take on the importance of funding leukemia research:

We had a record-breaking number of nonprofits participate in this round of Video Volunteers. Fifty health-oriented organizations signed up to have a member of the YouTube community make a video for them, and while we are only able to showcase a handful on the homepage today, we hope that many more nonprofits will have videos made for them. We'll leave these opportunities from health orgs up for a few more days on the Video Volunteers channel, so if you didn't make a video, but are passionate about helping one of these organizations, please reach out as soon as you can.

Next week, we'll launch our "Global Development" round of Video Volunteers. It's an issue that encompasses a number of different subjects, like poverty, sanitation and the need for infrastructure, and there are a number of nonprofits doing work in this area, like Plan International, One Million Lights, and the Playing for Change Foundation. We hope you'll make one of them a video.

Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism Manager, recently watched "Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation."