Locking SafeSearch

11/11/2009 08:00:00 AM

When you're searching on Google, we think you should have the choice to keep adult content out of your search results. That's why we developed SafeSearch, a feature that lets you filter sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We think it works pretty well, but we're always looking for ways to improve the feature.

Today we're launching a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting to the Strict level of filtering. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked:


Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

To use SafeSearch lock, go to the "Search Settings" page on Google. For detailed instructions, check out this video.



We hope you and your family find exactly what you’re looking for in Google search results — and nothing more.

Posted by Pete Lidwell, Product Manager and Aaron Arcos, Engineer

Twice the storage for a quarter of the price

11/10/2009 06:17:00 PM

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

People today have more personal data online than ever before. More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family. At the same time, digital photo technology is making it easier and cheaper than ever to take a lot of pictures, and client software like Picasa 3.5 makes it easier than ever to move photos from your camera to the cloud. That's why we've always given you lots of free storage in products like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and why for the past two years we've offered additional storage you can purchase if you need even more space.

While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year — that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha. If you need more than 20 GB, plans range all the way up to 16 TB, which is enough room for 8 million full resolution photos! And Google paid storage offers an extra level of security, protection and accessibility that you can't get with an external drive — at a similar cost per gigabyte.

As always, extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and people who have extra storage will be automatically upgraded. So if you need more space for thousands of photos of your toddler, or if you're running out of room in your overflowing inbox, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

Finding flu vaccine information in one easy place

11/10/2009 09:15:00 AM

This year, it's especially important to have clear information on what you can do to prepare for the flu season. With this in mind, we are happy to share a new feature for the U.S. which allows you to more easily find locations near you for getting both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine. After expanding Google Flu Trends to a total of 20 countries and 38 languages, allowing more people to see near real-time estimates of flu activity, we began brainstorming with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder and other ways Google can be helpful to people this flu season.

You can check out the flu shot finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites. It's important to note that this project is just beginning and we have not yet received information about flu shot clinics for many locations. In addition, many locations that are shown are currently out of stock. We launched this service now in order to help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute.


Especially given slower than expected vaccine production, we think it's important to bring together flu shot information in a coherent manner. We've been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot). At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

Of course you should still call flu vaccine providers ahead of time to find out more about availability and eligibility for the two vaccines.

We hope to continue providing you with relevant information to help keep you and your loved ones healthy.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager and Jennifer Haroon, Product Marketing Manager

A WiFi wonderland in the sky... and on the ground!

11/10/2009 08:00:00 AM

The holiday season is always about connecting with friends, family... and the web. During the holidays in particular, the web brings us closer to others through the email we send, YouTube videos we share, gifts we buy, holiday music we listen to and charitable donations we make. That's why a few weeks ago, Google announced that we're working with Virgin America to give free WiFi to all passengers on Virgin flights this holiday season.

If you're one of the millions of people who will be flying during this busy travel period, chances are you may spend more time in the airport than on the plane itself. So, starting today and lasting through January 15th, we're happy to announce that we will be offering free WiFi in 47 airports across the country. You can see the full list of airports here. This is one of our holiday gifts to our users, and, when you connect, we also hope that you'll take the opportunity to try some of the latest Google products. Our hope is that being connected for a few extra minutes (or hours, if you're delayed!) will help make things a bit easier. Be sure to look for the Google signs in an airport near you.

Here's to the beginning of a happy, healthy holiday season!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Happy 40th birthday Sesame Street!

11/09/2009 11:13:00 PM

It's hard to believe, but today marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street! Over the past four decades, Sesame Street has been entertaining and educating children all across the world. To pay tribute to the colorful cast of characters, we've been delighted to feature some of your favorites on the Google homepage during the past week. With this effort, we're honored to help support Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street. It's always great to see the spotlight on children's education, and we hope you enjoyed the homepage doodles as much as we did.

And, we have an exciting birthday surprise — for this very special celebration, we're happy to share a high-resolution gallery that includes all of the Sesame Street doodles for you to download. Almost as fun as the doodles themselves, there's even a sneak peak into the photo shoot that yielded today's doodle. As an added bonus, you'll also find a few extra characters that spent some time in other countries.

From Oscar to Elmo, the whole gang had a ton of fun hanging out with Google this week. So, enjoy the full series again, change your desktop background, hang them around your desk, and join us in celebrating Sesame Street!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Fifty states of Street View

11/09/2009 05:10:00 PM

In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state admitted to the union. Today, 50 years later, we're including Hawaii as the 50th state in Street View on Google Maps. With our imagery of Oahu and Maui, you can now take a virtual vacation to white sandy beaches, revisit special places from your honeymoon, or plan your next getaway. We've worked with the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau to create collections in our new Street View Gallery featuring Hawaii's best beaches and hometown favorites of President Obama.

Being born and raised on Oahu, I like to think we saved the best for last. I'll get you started with a tour around some of my favorite places from home.

Waimea Bay is famous for 30-foot winter waves. In the summer, as you can see in Street View, it transforms into a calm bay for snorkeling and swimming:

View Larger Map

If you're a history buff, you can also visit Iolani Palace, a national historic landmark that was the official residence of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s last two monarchs:

View Larger Map

This is just a small taste of all the beautiful sights in the Aloha State. Check out the gallery to see even more stunning high-resolution imagery. And now that we have imagery from all 50 states in the U.S., we've created tours of the 50 state capitol buildings for the gallery.

One of the great things about Street View is that it lets you virtually wander the streets of a diverse range of cities around the world, whether you want to gaze up at the Tokyo Tower in Japan or explore ancient Roman ruins in Italy. In addition to expanding our coverage in the U.S., today we're also adding imagery from Mexico for the first time, covering Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Puebla, Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Cozumel:

View Larger Map

As we keep working to bring Street View to new countries and cities across the globe, we want to hear directly from you about the places that you want to see featured in Street View next. A few weeks ago, we asked you to submit your nominations for places that you want our Street View trike to visit. We combed through more than 25,000 submissions and today we're unveiling the finalists. You can read more about the competition and the finalists on the Lat Long blog, and head to www.google.com/trike to cast your votes for the special locations we should add to Google Maps next.

Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager

Investing in a mobile future with AdMob

11/09/2009 09:15:00 AM

We're happy to announce today that we have signed an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company based in San Mateo, CA. AdMob is a great Silicon Valley story — founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui when he couldn't find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site. Over the past few years, Omar and his talented team have built a thriving company with great mobile advertising products, and we are looking forward to having them join the Google team and work with us on the future of mobile advertising.

We've written in the past about how mobile phones are becoming an increasingly indispensable part of our daily lives, and we continue to see how great devices with full Internet browsers and vibrant app marketplaces are driving an explosion of usage. In fact:

• iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google's 5x mobile search growth over the past two years
• And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]

Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal.

For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue.

For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats.

Last, but certainly not least, we believe users will benefit from this deal — through more mobile content and through better mobile ads that deliver useful information. And that's good for all of us. For more information, check out this site that we've set up about the deal.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management and Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering

Google Apps highlights 11/6/2009

11/06/2009 07:06:00 PM

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.

Individuals, businesses and schools are switching to Google Apps to communicate more efficiently from anywhere, collaborate without the hassle of attachments, save money, and get continuous innovation. Because you use Google Apps in your browser, improvements like new features in Google forms show up automatically. Starting today, we'll post a recap every couple of weeks highlighting significant improvements we've made in Google Apps, and major milestones in this area, similar to our weekly series on Search. We hope this helps you experience what's new for yourself!

More interface consistency across Google Docs
We heard your feedback about design inconsistencies in the user interfaces for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and we agree; having a more consistent user interface is a better experience. Last week we rolled out a batch of changes making the links, title area, menus, menu terminology and toolbar more uniform. We think this will make it easier to find commonly used functions, speed up your experience with Google Docs and make you more productive in these browser-based applications.

Customizable options for Gmail offline
Gmail offline lets you work with your email from the browser even when you don't have an internet connection, but until now, you couldn't specify how much old mail you wanted to cache for offline access. On Wednesday we launched new options for Gmail offline, and now you can configure how much of your old email is available when you don't have a connection. Once you enable Offline Gmail from the Labs tab in Settings, go to the Offline settings tab to customize which labels are synchronized, how far back messages are included, and which attachments you'll be able to access offline in your browser.

Google Docs bulk export
We firmly believe it should be easy to move files saved on your computer into the cloud, and that you should be able to move your data out of Google Apps whenever you want. After all, it's your data, and you should be able to do what you want with it. In the spirit of Data Liberation, last week we made it even easier for you to pull your documents, spreadsheets, forms, presentations and PDFs out of Google Docs with "Convert, Zip and Download". Just select the files in Google Docs that you want to save, go to 'More Actions' > 'Export', then choose your preferred output file formats. Your items will be saved to your computer in a tidy zip file.

Visual indicators for edited and all-new items in Google Docs
The shared items in your Google Docs account evolve as the people you collaborate with make edits and share new items with you. This is fundamentally different from how it works with files saved on your computer. Last week we started showing visual indicators in Google Docs to make it easier to spot what's changed and what's been newly shared with you. The names of files that have been edited since you lasted opened them are in bold, and shared files that you haven't opened yet have a red 'New!' tag.

Administrator controls for Chat
Companies and schools using Google Apps sometimes want to limit how their users communicate with Google Talk and Gmail Chat. For example, some K12 schools don't want outsiders instant messaging with their students. To meet this need, we now let IT administrators select if their users should only be able to chat with each other, and not with external users. This new option is found in the Chat service settings area of the Premier and Education Edition control panels.

Over two million businesses have gone Google
Companies around the world are moving to the cloud with Google Apps, and we just crossed the two million customers milestone. To hear how Google Apps is bringing faster innovation to employees, eliminating major hassles for IT managers and saving companies big bucks, read some of their quotes or visit out our YouTube customer channel.

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 Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management and Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise

This week in search 11/6/09

11/06/2009 01:35:00 PM

This week we brought out some new search tools for the phone and for the web. We also enhanced our universal search with a better interface for product results.

Multiple pictures of products in Universal Search
We've added multiple images to product results in Universal Search. On broader queries, this helps you get a sense of the range of products available to you for the query. Here's what it looks like:

Example searches: digital cameras, pin nailer, glider, bouncy house, outdoor dining set

Search Options panel now has page previews and is live in more languages
We have added a new tool to the Search Options panel called page previews, currently available in English, Japanese and Korean. Page previews allow you to see additional text as well as an image preview of the page. This is a new way to summarize web pages that show up in the search results list. In the interest of keeping the Search Options panel interface simple, we've combined page previews with the earlier tool for longer snippets — both serve a very similar purpose and, we feel, work well together. Here you can see a screenshot of the new feature at work:

The Search Options panel is also now available in 11 new languages: Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.

Google search by voice for Nokia S60 phones in English and Mandarin Chinese
On Monday we announced that Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones in English and Mandarin Chinese. The new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to search using your voice or by typing. You can search for anything — from "movie times" to "fish 'n chips" to "masala dosa." And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you don't have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer. This feature is available in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Sesame Street doodle
In honor of Sesame Street's 40th anniversary on November 10th, the Google homepage has had a daily sequence of doodles created in partnership with Sesame Street around the favorite characters on the show — starting, of course, with Big Bird.

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for next week!

Posted by Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer

Even more music for you to find with Google search

11/06/2009 10:06:00 AM

Last week, we launched a new music search feature, which helps you search and discover millions of songs with a simple Google search. When you search for an artist, song, album or even a few lyrics, you'll find links to our partner sites — putting you just one click away from listening to and purchasing the music you're looking for.

To celebrate our launch, MySpace and Lala are hosting exclusive, never-before-heard tracks from a variety of artists — and we're helping people to find those tracks through a simple Google search. So if you're a Lady Gaga fan looking for a new remix, in love with the Arctic Monkeys and looking for something extra or hunting for a new acoustic track from YouTube sensation Zee Avi, just search for it. You'll find links to these tracks right in your regular search results. And when you click the links, you'll be able to hear the songs directly from MySpace and Lala.

We know how much you care about music, and we're excited to partner with Lala and MySpace to help you discover more music from artists you love, using Google. To see the full list of tracks and read more, check out the blogposts on Lala and MySpace. We hope you enjoy the music.

Posted by R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management