Google Docs and college life

As the start of the academic year draws close, students are always looking for new ways to make life at school run more smoothly, whether it's working on group projects or keeping track of dorm budgets.

With that in mind, we're launching a new Google Docs page for college students. This page has new Google Docs tips including some templates designed specifically for resident assistants, teaching assistants, and student leaders. We've also made a video showcasing how a lovestruck student collaborates with friends using Docs.



To learn more about how Google Docs can help college students, check out our new page.

Posted by: Stephanie Vezich, Summer Intern, Google Docs

Copy your site, more search options, and better announcements for Google Sites

We know that many of you create groups of similar sites. To make this easier, we now allow site owners to copy entire sites (Manage site -> General -> Copy site).

The "recent announcement" gadget is also getting an upgrade today. You now have control over how much text is shown in the post summary. You can even show the full post content which is useful for putting a "word of the day" or "photo of the day" on the site home page. You can also configure the gadget to show a thumbnail of the first photo in the post.

Additionally, site owners now have more control over the search box (Manage site -> Site layout -> Configure search). It can be configured to search across multiple sites, making it easier to unify related sites. Businesses and schools using Google Apps can configure it to search across all sites in their domains, which is useful for an intranet site. External search providers can also be used such as a Custom Search Engine or a Google Search Appliance. (Learn more about search options.)



Posted by Russ Vrolyk, Software Engineer

Street View gets down to business

Finding a business with Street View just became easier. For example, if you search for "thai restaurants near mountain view" on Google Maps, and click on a search result, a bubble pops up with various links, including a link to "Street View".

You can click on the "Street View" link to see the restaurant marked directly in Street View with a 3D marker just like the one you'd find on the map. Clicking the marker displays more details about the restaurant without leaving Street View.

If you move along the street, you will continue to see the marker in front of the restaurant, letting you see a business in the context of what else is around it. Double-clicking the marker will jump you back to the closest view.

While you are in Street View, you can also click on another search result in the left panel to jump to the closest view for that result. Take a look at this video for a quick overview:

We use the position of the business on the map to approximately display it as a 3D marker in Street View. We are continuously working on improving the quality of the underlying map, and this will result in more and more businesses being positioned with high accuracy in Street View over time.

Posted by Abhijit Ogale and Andrea Frome, Street View engineers

Love school with Google Docs

It's that time of year again. Time to brush off the sand from lazy days at the beach and hit the books. Time for group projects, club registrations, and dorm events. As I start my senior year at Stanford, this is the last time I'll experience back to school, and I'm hoping to make the most of it with a little help from Google Docs.

I've collaborated with classmates on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations throughout my college career, but after interning at Google for a summer and talking to many of you about how you use Google Docs, there are a few new ideas I'm itching to try, like new templates for resident assistants, teaching assistants, and student leaders.

Curious to learn more about Google Docs yourself? Check out our new Google Docs page for college students. You'll find tips and tricks -- based off much of your own feedback -- for great ways to save time with Google Docs both in and out of the classroom.

For one particularly fun way to reap the benefits of collaborating with Google Docs, check out this video about a lovestruck student on a mission. Enjoy, and have a great school year!

Posted by Stephanie Vezich, Google Docs Summer Intern

3D makes headline news in Belgrade

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]
This morning, we received an email from a geo-modeler named Zexland from Belgrade, Serbia. This Industrial Design student was very proud to share that his 3D buildings in Google Earth made front page news in the local Serbian newspapers.

The newspaper article, "Three-dimensional Begrade," is translated to English or if you happen to understand Serbian, here is the original article. Good work Zeljko, we're very proud of your beautiful modeling!


Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

Google voice and video plugin update

Recently, we released the 1.0.13 update for the Google voice and video chat software. All current installations have begun an automatic update and should reach you within the next few days. If you do not have the plugin, you can visit http://www.google.com/chat/video and run the installer.

Here's what's new in version 1.0.13:

• Improved startup time for both voice and video calls.
• Detection and recovery for some situations that would cause the plugin to hang indefinitely, which could lead to messaging like "Detecting devices" in the settings page or "Add voice/video chat" in the roster or chat menu.
• Fixed connectivity problems caused by VMWare virtual network adapters.

You can use your Gmail account to find out what version is currently installed. Simply go to the Gmail Settings page and look under the "Chat" tab. You will see the plugin version under the "Learn more" link, in small type.

If you're on 1.0.13 and still having a problem, please report it on the Gmail voice and video chat forums.

Posted by Tim Haloun

Software Engineer

Composing a message? Try the contact chooser

Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager

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


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

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

Malware Statistics Update

Posted by Niels Provos, Security Team

Every now and then people ask us for an update on the malware statistics we published in the All Your iFrames Point To Us blog post. We're glad to share this sort of data because we believe that collaboration and information sharing are crucial in driving anti-malware efforts forward. Here is a small update containing some interesting trends we've observed over the last 12 months.

Number of Entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List

As we mentioned in our Top-10 Malware Sites blog post, we have seen a large increase in the number of compromised sites since April. The number of entries on our malware list has more than doubled in one year, and we have seen periods in which 40,000 web sites were compromised per week. However, compared to infections associated with Gumblar and Martuz — two relatively large and well-known pieces of malicious code, many compromised web sites now point to hundreds of different domains. As these malware trends evolve, we're constantly improving our systems to better detect compromised web sites. The increase in compromised sites we observed may have also been influenced by our improved detection capabilities.

Search Results Containing a URL Labeled as Harmful

The above graph shows the percentage of daily queries that contain at least one search result that we labeled as harmful. In January 2008, more than 1.2% of all Google search queries contained at least one such result (you can review a graph of this data in the aforementioned All Your iFrames Point To Us post). Since then, there has been a downward trend to well below 1%. We noticed an increase around May 2009, and that growth may be due to the appearance of a larger number of compromised web sites. That said, it's encouraging that compared to last year, fewer search queries contain results to potentially harmful sites.

Users of Google search, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari receive warnings when visiting sites we identify as potentially harmful. These warnings are produced by our Safe Browsing API, a technology that is freely available for webmasters to implement.

Arterial traffic available on Google Maps

Commuters have long relied on traffic sites to help them determine their last-minute path around poor traffic on the highway. But if the traffic looks bad on the highways, you'll probably want to know how it looks on the alternate routes through arterials. I usually would just guess that the traffic on back roads is light, but with this new launch the guesswork is eliminated: Google Maps will now show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads in selected cities. Just zoom-in on the city you're interested in, and click the "Traffic" button in the upper-right corner of the map. As you zoom in closer to an area of interest, we'll color the arterial roads, in addition to the highways, to show current traffic conditions. Just as with the highways, the colors correspond to the speed of traffic (relative to the speed limit of the road): green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic. For example, here's how traffic looks near the Google Seattle office today.

Here are some examples of what you can find out with this new feature:

Highways aren't looking great. Probably time to take the scenic route!

Trying to get to the airport on time? Now you can see the traffic on many of the roads leading there so you know the best route to take so you won't miss your flight:

If you have Google Maps for Mobile, you can see the same traffic there and, better yet, help improve the data: See our post on the Official Google Blog about traffic crowdsourcing. Here's to a happier commute!

Posted by Jordan Weitz, Software Engineer, Google Traffic Team

Request for High Quality Images and New "Online Only" Attribute

When you're considering purchasing an item online, it's helpful to know what that product looks like, with as much visual detail as possible. Images that are very small, like thumbnail pictures, don't help customers as much as larger images that show more product detail. While a small image is better than no image at all, we'd like to ask that when submitting a product feed, you include links to the largest images you have. (We prefer images that are at least 300x300 pixels, but please don't re-size the image to be larger - just send us the highest-quality original you have.)

Additionally, as we begin to experiment with showing local store locations in Product Search, we want to make sure we're using the most accurate information. For that reason, we've added a new optional attribute to our Feed Specification. The new "online only" attribute is used to indicate items that are only available for purchase online, and not available for purchase in-store or for in-store pickup. For more details on formatting the "online only" attribute, please see the Feed Specification. If you have local store locations and are not yet submitting those to Google Product Search, please follow the directions in this blog post.

Posted by Janna Salinas, Google Base Support

3 Days, 3 Googlers, 2 CPUs, 8 Cores: Google goes to Camp Roberts

Recently, three Googlers visited Camp Roberts near Paso Robles in central California. The exercise, organized and hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School, brought tech companies together with testers to collaborate on disaster relief, humanitarian aid, and development.

Shortly after we arrived, we disrupted the relative quiet of the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) by spooling up an 8-core Google Earth Enterprise Server to process satellite imagery provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). We used the server to process the imagery – 1m resolution GeoEye IKONOS scenes over Jalalabad, Afghanistan – with Google Earth Fusion to create a 3D globe and set of Mercator map tiles. We then published the tiles to the Portable Earth Server running in an Ubuntu Virtual Machine to be used as a base imagery layer for mashups by other applications including Sahana, Development Seed, FortiusOne, Open Street Map, and InSTEDD.



Once we provided the new imagery tiles, other applications could pull the imagery into Disaster Management systems, and, combined with their value-added utilities, continually update their geo-information, which positioned them to respond more quickly to the next disaster.

Later in the afternoon, volunteers from the Open Street Map Foundation, Umbrella Consulting, and Stamen Design utilized the imagery tiles and Open Street Map vector overlays to print hard-copy "Walking Papers." These Walking Papers were sent into the field where road and structure information was noted by hand. Back at the TOC, the annotated maps were scanned. Because a QR code on the maps contained coordinate information, annotations were automatically georeferenced as the data was imported into the Open Street Map database. This paper-and-pen method was a smart, practical, low-tech way to to increase the accuracy and data density of vector data for an area of interest.

We saw first-hand the range of challenges technologists face as they look to balance ever-changing information with tools designed for a highly connected world, and as they work in less-than-ideal states of connectivity out in the field. Some problems were successfully dispatched in 20 minutes; others remained unsolved after 3 days.

This week at Camp Roberts reaffirmed the powerful role that agile deployments of geospatial visualization and analysis can play in the quest to build sustainable political structures and mitigate human suffering. We learned to adapt and respond to mixed states of connectivity, and wide ranges of technological states and proficiencies amongst end users. We are going to keep working on projects that aid in the mitigation, recovery and building processes. And we're going to keep supporting open source applications and data projects that address these challenges–and are flexible enough to meet them.

Posted by Jeff Martin, Sean Wohltman, &Dylan Lorimer; Google Earth Enterprise and Google Crisis Response Teams