Using Google Voice for Android just got a whole lot faster. Until now, notifications of new messages appeared within 15 minutes of when they were sent. Today we are releasing a new feature called Inbox synchronization, which will notify your Android-powered device of new text messages or voicemails within seconds of receiving new messages in your Google Voice inbox.
To activate Inbox synchronization, open the Google Voice settings on your phone and touch Refresh and notification. Once you have selected the Synchronize Inbox option, you will start receiving faster notifications. Plus, Google Voice will automatically disable SMS forwarding to your mobile phone, so you won’t receive duplicate notifications.
Finally, we have made it much faster to interact with your contacts from the Google Voice app. Now you can click on any contact photo and get the option to quickly respond to voicemail by email or IM.
The updated app is available for download from Android Market today. You will need a valid Google Voice account to use the app, and at this time, Google Voice is available in the US only.
Earlier this month, we launched a new beta of Google Chrome that brought automatic translation and fine-grained privacy controls to the browser. Today, those features have been promoted to the stable channel so all Chrome users can try them out.
Google Chrome’s translation feature uses the supercool Google Translate technology -- today, it works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. In Chrome, the language detection takes place in the browser, not on Google servers. If the page isn’t in a language you know, Chrome offers to translate it for you by sending it through Google Translate. If you’re curious about the technical nitty-gritty involved in integrating translation in Chrome, check out our post on the Google Translate Blog.
Today’s stable release also comes with some new privacy features and a tweak to our Google Update technology. Now, there’s a set of “Content Settings” options that let you manage how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can block all cookies except for the ones from sites you trust. We’ve also implemented a new approach to our Google Update technology, which allows us to remove the unique ID from Google Update while still preserving our ability to determine the number of active users and keep everyone up-to-date with the latest security updates and speed improvements. Chrome has many other existing and new features to help you manage your information. You can learn more about all of these features at google.com/chrome/privacy, watch our video series on browser privacy, or check out the video below about how to manage Cookies ‘n Chrome.
We’re excited that these new features are now available to all Chrome users. For those of you who currently use Chrome, you should be updated automatically within the next few days. You can also download the browser directly at google.com/chrome. And if you need a place to try out your new found translation abilities, try searching for the best way to tell your friends “Beannacht Lá Fhéile Pádraig”!
Today we’re introducing a change to Google Merchant Center requirements to help ensure that you’re the only one submitting product listings for your site.
You will now need to verify yourself as the owner of the site and then claim the URL in order to submit product listings for that site. This requires two separate steps:
Once your site is verified, sign in to your Google Merchant Center account and click the “Claim this URL” link on your General Settings page.
It’s a small inconvenience that you’ll have to go through once, but it’s important to make sure you’re the only one authorized to upload product listings for your site.
Existing Merchant Center users need to verify and claim their URLs by May 18th. After that, this requirement will become mandatory and product listings for non-verified or non-claimed URLs will be disapproved. New Merchant Center users will be prompted to do this when they begin the sign-up process.
Our Help Center article has more information on how to go about verifying and claiming your website URL.
Posted by Ioannis Kalafatis, Product Manager, Google Merchant Center
Since launching Google Docs forms last year, we’ve enjoyed seeing people use them for everything from wedding guest lists and party invites to surveys and scorekeeping for Oscar parties. We’re hard at work improving this feature, and we want to know more about what you think.
We recently added a new section specifically for forms to our Product Ideas for Google Docs page. Head over and tell us what you think we should do to make forms better, and see what others have to say as well. If you come across other ideas you like, vote them up.
Since launching Google Docs forms last year, we’ve enjoyed seeing people use them for everything from wedding guest lists and party invites to surveys and scorekeeping for Oscar parties. We’re hard at work improving this feature, and we want to know more about what you think.
We recently added a new section specifically for forms to our Product Ideas for Google Docs page. Head over and tell us what you think we should do to make forms better, and see what others have to say as well. If you come across other ideas you like, vote them up.
Google Maps is often one of the first stops travelers make to find and compare hotels. Today we started experimenting with a new feature, visible to a small portion of users, to help make that process even easier by showing specific prices for selected hotel listings.
With this feature, when you search for hotels on Google Maps you'll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings. You can click on the price to see a list of advertisers who have provided pricing information for that hotel, indicated by the "Sponsored" text, and click through to reserve a room on the advertiser’s site. By showing you this relevant hotel rate information directly in the Google Maps results panel we hope to make this aspect of your trip planning more speedy and efficient - so you can get where you're going and enjoy your travel destination!
Here's an example of the Google Maps results for someone who is searching for hotels in New York City: This new feature will not change the way that hotels are ranked in Google Maps. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors, regardless of whether there is an associated price.
While we're experimenting with this feature, we're currently working with a limited number of advertisers and it will only be visible to a small portion of users . As always, we'll evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new feature based on both data and feedback, and hope to make it available to more users and offer prices from more partners over time.
Google and Lime Connect are proud to announce the results of our 2nd Annual Google Lime Scholarship!
Please join us in congratulating the 11 students who we are recognizing for their outstanding leadership, passion and achievement in Computer Science.
Aaron Goldman - Georgia Institute of Technology
Alicia Grubb - University Of Toronto
Alyssa Rosenzweig - University Of Toronto
Casey Burkhardt - Villanova University
Joseph Shanahan - Auburn University
Micah Brodsky - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michael Jolley - University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Nektarios Paisios - New York University
Roy Martinez - Arizona State University Main
Shaun Kane - University of Washington
Shiri Azenkot - University of Washington
Google Lime scholars will each receive an academic scholarship and are invited to an all-expenses paid trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California this summer.
The safety of the Internet is of paramount importance to Google, and helping web developers build secure, reliable web applications is an important part of the equation. To advance this goal, we have released projects such as ratproxy, a passive security assessment tool; and Browser Security Handbook, a comprehensive guide for web developers. We also worked with the community to improve the security of third-party browsers.
Today, we are happy to announce the availability of skipfish - our free, open source, fully automated, active web application security reconnaissance tool. We think this project is interesting for a few reasons:
High speed: written in pure C, with highly optimized HTTP handling and a minimal CPU footprint, the tool easily achieves 2000 requests per second with responsive targets.
Ease of use: the tool features heuristics to support a variety of quirky web frameworks and mixed-technology sites, with automatic learning capabilities, on-the-fly wordlist creation, and form autocompletion.
Cutting-edge security logic: we incorporated high quality, low false positive, differential security checks capable of spotting a range of subtle flaws, including blind injection vectors.
As with ratproxy, we feel that skipfish will be a valuable contribution to the information security community, making security assessments significantly more accessible and easier to execute.
To download the scanner, please visit this page; detailed project documentation is available here.
