Saturday 28 November 2009

Tip: New tab from the omnibox

If you've ever wanted to search or navigate without disrupting the page you're currently reading, you've probably opened a new tab to do so. This means either clicking the "new tab" button at the end of the tabstrip, or using the "new tab" menu item or keyboard shortcut (ctrl-t).


A little-known shortcut can help you do this even faster.




If you type something in to the omnibox and hold down the Alt key while you press enter, the resulting page will open as a new tab at the end of your tabstrip, leaving your previous page untouched.




This way you can skip creating a new tab, and go straight to typing in what you want.

Thursday 26 November 2009

​Google Apps Premier Edition Innovation – Year in Review

Google Apps is helping millions of companies save money, but more importantly, Google Apps helps businesses move beyond the slow, multi-year innovation cycle typical of legacy technologies. We’ve released over 100 significant improvements and updates over the last year, and businesses automatically have access to these updates without having to manage complex and costly upgrades.

Last week I hosted a webcast titled Google Apps Premier Edition Innovation – Year in Review to spotlight the most important improvements we’ve made recently. You can watch the replay below or see it on YouTube.



Innovation happening across the web is rapidly translating into better business email tools, more efficient collaboration choices for coworkers, and more secure, higher reliability technology for companies. We’re excited about what’s in store for Google Apps, and to keep up with future developments, you can subscribe to the Google Apps Updates RSS feed, or sign up for email alerts.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

31 Google Maps tips for smooth sailing through the holiday season

With families coming together, the start of the ski season, and weekly shopping trips becoming acceptable, there's a lot to love about the holiday season. What's that? Gridlocked traffic? Fully booked hotels? Can't find the perfect gift? Oh my, the holidays are rough!

To help kick off your season right, we've put together a list of 31 Google Maps tips for life to help you to save time, look smart, and manage your travels efficiently. Start with the tips that are right for you, based on what type of expert you'd like to become: a Local Expert, Ace Navigator, Global Explorer, or Business Owner. You can try a tip a day for a month, or blast through them all at once.

Here are my favorite tips from each section:

Local Expert Tip #3: Just keep searching
It's rare that you leave the house with only one goal in mind. More often you're heading to one place, like a party across town, but you need to pick up your contribution at the grocery store and get gas along the way. In Google Maps, you can see multiple searches layered on the map all at the same time. When you do two or more consecutive searches, you'll notice a blue bar at the bottom of the left panel. Click on it to expand the widget, which allows you to turn on both searches at once.

The markers on the map are color-coded, so you can tell which search is which. This is perfect for helping you pick the most efficient route to accomplish all your goals.

Ace Navigator Tip #4: Check live and predictive traffic information
Traffic patterns are hard to decipher when you're driving out-of-town. For both highways and arterial roads, Google Maps provides live and predictive traffic information for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions and live crowdsourcing. Plan your departure times to avoid traffic jams!

Global Explorer Tip #6: A page for every place
No matter how far from home your travels take you, with Google Maps on your side you can become an expert even in a foreign locale. By clicking on the "More Info" link in a business listing, easily learn more about any place on the map with information ranging from photos to reviews to store hours. A Place Page is like a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. Who wants blueberry pancakes in New York? I've never been there, but I'd now recommend Clinton Street Baking Co, which has the "best blueberry pancakes ever!" according to reviews.

Cross your fingers that the economy is recovering, but even so, holiday shoppers are likely to be on the lookout for bargains. Google Insights for Search shows that searches for coupons are still up. By claiming your Google business listing through Local Business Center, you can create coupons that will appear alongside your business listing on Google Maps. Let Google users print your coupons and bring them to your business, or even show your coupons on mobile phones to attract customers on the go.

Enjoy our new tips for life, and next time you find someone lacking in holiday cheer, just share with them one of 31 ways to save time, look smart, and manage their travels more efficiently, like you.



University of Waterloo's Artificial Intelligence Contest

Jeff Cameron is the Google Student Ambassador at the University of Waterloo, where he studies Computer Science and Math. As part of his role as ambassador, he recently hosted a great event focused on Artificial Intelligence, and we wanted to share his story with you here.

In the 2009 Artificial Intelligence Contest at the University of Waterloo, participants used both simple and sophisticated AI techniques to create programs that would intelligently play a simple game. The submitted programs competed in head-to-head tournaments to see how they all ranked compared to one another. Contestants could re-submit their code on the contest website as often as they liked, and the online leaderboard was updated once every hour with fresh tournament results.

A screenshot of the hourly leaderboard after the contest had been open for a few days.

The contest was initially supposed to stay open for two weeks, but was extended by another week due to unexpectedly high participation. Almost 300 participants were involved, with about 150 people submitting their entries to the final tournament. The contest webpage received over 50,000 hits from 38 countries. The final tournament took place at the Contest Finale Code Party, held at the University of Waterloo.
Pictures from the Contest Finale Codeparty. The very talented Mr. Jesse Onland serenades some happy coders with his mad banjo skills.

Some contestants huddle while adding the finishing touches to their entries.


The contest organizer (me), with this year's grand champion, Alex Stan.

Our congratulations goes out to the winner of this year's Google Artificial Intelligence Contest, Alexandru Stan! A big thank you also goes out to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club for organizing and hosting the contest. Full contest results are available here.

Posted by Jeff Cameron, Google Campus Ambassador at University of Waterlo

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Google Product Search on the Official Google Blog

Earlier today, Jeff and Sameer from the Product Search team shared some holiday shopping updates on the Official Google Blog. Check out their post to see a recap of some of the work we've been doing over the past few months, including local store locations, video product reviews, and our new gallery view, among others.

Posted by Vivek Tata, Product Marketing Manager, Google Product Search


Send attachments while offline

Posted by Andy Palay, Software Engineer

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

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

If you haven't tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:
  1. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
  2. Click Save Changes.
  3. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline" link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.
Now that you can send attachments while offline, we'd love to see pictures of you using Gmail in unusual places while you're disconnected from the web. Pictures of you using Gmail in an airplane, igloo, or submarine are all welcome. Email your photo to hikingfan@gmail.com and we'll post the most interesting ones here.

With coupons on your phone, it doesn't matter where you left the scissors


We know that coupons are a great way for local businesses to drive customers to their stores - that's why we created the option for businesses to add coupons to their Google Local Business Center listing back in 2007. Now, as the holiday shopping season kicks off, we've upgraded the ways that customers can find your coupons.

First up, with more and more people using their mobile devices to find local businesses, we've added a new option for Local Business Center users in the US to display their coupons on mobile devices. Additionally, we've made it simpler to find and print coupons from your desktop, so now it's easy to get discounts wherever you are.

Coupons on a mobile device
If you add a new coupon to your business listing in Local Business Center, by default it will now be available on mobile devices. To make your existing coupons available on mobile, edit them and check the box for Mobile Distribution, as shown here:

When users pull up your business listing on their mobile phone, they'll see a section that lists the available coupons. They can then click to find a specially-formated page which shows all the coupon details they need for redeeming it. Now even when customers are on the go, they can see all the great values and offers available from your business.


Improved interface for desktops

We've also overhauled the printable pages that people visit from a business' Place Page. Now you can be confident that every Google coupon customers bring to your store will look the same, helping you and your staff easily recognize and redeem them. In addition to the re-design, we've made sure that the coupons print out correctly and consistently across all major browsers and operating systems.


To create a coupon now or to claim your business with Local Business Center for the first time, visit google.com/lbc.

Posted by David Armstrong, Software Engineer


Street View trike competition university finalists

Last month we asked you to nominate your campus to be photographed for Street View on Google Maps. We were inundated with more than 25,000 suggestions across all categories, and university campuses made up 44% of all suggestions!

We've narrowed the top suggested locations to a few finalists and there is now just one week left in the voting period. Cast your vote for your favorite place within each category to tell us which locations you'd most like to see on Google Maps. The university finalists are:
  • Arizona State University
  • Michigan State University
  • Princeton University
  • Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Stanford University
Visit www.google.com/trike to vote and see the other finalists! You can vote as many times as you like until the deadline at 11:59pm PST on Monday, November 30th. We'll then work on getting all the winners into Google Maps, and of course we'll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of any privately-owned locations.

If voting for Street View trike finalists gets you excited about how much you love Google Maps, be sure to check out our new Google Maps tips for life to help you save time, look smart, and manage your travels efficiently.

More Information about Malware Details



A month ago we announced the release of a new Webmaster Tools feature that helps webmasters identify malicious content that has been surreptitiously added to their sites. We've been working on improving the quality of the feature since it launched, and yesterday we released some changes that should make the information even more useful. Most of the changes have occurred behind the scenes, but the end result is that we can provide more data, with higher accuracy, and do so more quickly. If your site is receiving a malware warning for Google search results, please visit Webmaster Tools for more details about the problematic code that our automated systems have discovered.

We will continue to improve the feature over time and welcome feedback via comments on this blogpost. If you are a webmaster of a compromised site and use the feature to help clean your site, please include feedback in the comment field of the appeal request.


Monday 23 November 2009

Announcing the Chromium OS Open Source Project

Today we released Chromium OS, the open source project behind Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS is an operating system that is intended for people who spend most of their time on the web. It aims to provide a computing experience that is fast, simple and secure. The Chromium OS project as you'll see it today is comprised of the code that has been developed thus far, our early experiments with the user interface, and detailed design docs for many parts that are under active development.

To learn more about what Google Chrome OS is, watch this short video:


To get a feel for the Google Chrome OS user experience, you can watch the demo from this morning's announcement event.



Uniting for a cause


At an event organized jointly by the United Nations and Google at Google's office in New York, 80 United Nations delegates from more than 20 UN agencies, met with various Google product teams to explore how Google's wide array of products and services can further the UN mission and help foster innovation and new thinking. Google's Alfred Spector and the U.N.'s Choi Soon-hong, the first Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) for the United Nations, both gave inspirational keynote addresses. We discussed products and tools including Google Earth & Map Maker, Flu Trends, visualization APIs, public data search, and much more.


One consistent theme was the desire to increase momentum in efforts to collaborate and share information publicly in ways that will help all U.N. agencies and other humanitarian organizations meet new challenges in an increasingly networked society. This same theme was echoed in the workshop that Google hosted in Washington DC with over 20 international humanitarian organizations last month.


Google's Map Maker Product Manager Lior Ron made two exciting announcements at the event. On the heels of our recent announcement of the Latin America Mapping competition, Google will be launching a global mapping competition in partnership with UNICEF. The competition will run December 15 - January 31, and Google will donate $50k to UNICEF that will go toward programs that empower young people through technology in the home country of the competition winner.


The other announcement is that Map Maker data for Southeast Asia is available for download for non-commercial uses. The 9 Southeast Asian countries where Map Maker is open for editing that are now included in the Map Maker download program are Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.


The Map Maker download license is available for non-profits, government agencies, and individuals to create and enhance their own non-commercial map-related projects as long as attribution is given back to Map Maker. We started this data download program with the Africa dataset over the summer. See our new Map Maker partner showcase page to learn how several United Nations agencies have used Map Maker data to further their humanitarian missions.





Join us for the 2010 Google GRAD CS Forum!

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encouraging students of underrepresented backgrounds in technology to pursue graduate study, we are pleased to host the first annual 2010 Google Graduate Researchers in Academia of Diverse backgrounds (GRAD) CS Forum. This forum will bring together students who are historically underrepresented in the field to connect with one another and with Google.

Up to 75 computer scientists will be invited to an all-expenses paid forum that will run Thursday evening through Saturday afternoon on January 21–23 at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The Google GRAD CS Forum will include technical talks from established researchers – both from Google and universities – and a unique occasion to build and strengthen networks with other emerging researchers. Students will also enjoy tours of the Googleplex, have the opportunity to meet with Google engineers in their focus areas, and have fun exploring the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eligibility Requirements

Applicants must:
  • be a computer science (or related technical discipline) graduate student currently enrolled in a Masters or PhD program at a university in North America
  • demonstrate academic excellence and leadership in the computing field
  • maintain a cumulative GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale or 4.3 on a 5.0 scale or equivalent in their current program
The forum is open to all qualified graduate students, and is committed to addressing diversity in our company and in the technology industry. Students who are a member of a group that is historically under-represented in the technology industry are encouraged to apply, including female, Native American, African American and Hispanic students as well as students with disabilities.

Selection Process

Google engineers will select up to 75 attendees based on each applicant’s academic and technical achievements. Evidence of academic achievement and leadership experience should be evident from the resume.

How to Apply

Complete the online application and submit all required documents online. First-time users will be required to register and create an account. Please note that recommendation letters are not required.

Application Deadline: December 12, 2009

Apply now at www.google.com/jobs/students/gradforum.

Posted by Hanah Kim, University Programs

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