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Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Discovering hard-to-find books
October 31, 2005
Posted by Adam Smith, Senior Business Product Manager, Google Print
Tomorrow is the day we said we'd resume scanning in-copyright works with our library partners as part of our initiative to build a card catalog of books with
Google Print
. We are in the process of resuming scanning (it may take a little time), so you should soon be able to search across more books from our partner libraries at
print.google.com
. We've already had great success working with publishers directly to add their works to our index through our
Publisher Program
, and when we add books with publisher permission, we can offer more information and a much richer user experience.
As always, the focus of our library effort is on scanning books that are unique to libraries including many public domain books, orphaned works and out-of-print titles. We're starting with library stacks that mostly contain older and out-of-circulation books, but also some newer books. That said, we want to make all books easier to find, and as we get through the older parts of the libraries we'll start scanning the stacks that house newer books.
These older books are the ones most inaccessible to users, and make up the vast majority of books – a conservative estimate would be 80 percent. Our digital card catalog will let people discover these books through Google search, see their bibliographic information, view
short snippets
related to their queries (never the full text), and offer them links to places where they can buy the book or find it in a local library.
We think that making books easier to find will be good for authors, publishers, and our users. We're excited to get back to work making a comprehensive, free, full-text card catalog of the world's books a reality. Happy searching!
More video to watch!
October 31, 2005
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Saying thank you with pictures
October 28, 2005
Posted by Beth Campbell, Product Marketing Manager
I recently got married and wanted to send out thank-you notes together with hundreds of photos our guests took using the cameras we put on the tables.
Picasa
made the process super easy.
In Picasa, select the folder with your pictures. Click the "Gift CD" button and follow the instructions to set your picture size and CD name. To add a nice effect, check the "Include Slideshow" box -- this adds a slideshow presentation that plays when the CD is launched (way more fun than a boring list of files). For recipients who might enjoy saving the photos and viewing them later, check the box to include a copy of Picasa on the CD (it's only 3.9MB). Click "Burn Disc" and Picasa creates the CD.
The finishing touch: a customized photo CD cover. Select a picture and click the "Print" button. Here's what it looks like:
In the top menu, go to to Tools > Options > Printing, select CD Label Size and click OK. Set CD Label as your layout size and print.
You're done -- and now I'm done with my thank-you "work." I'm happy to report the photo CDs were a big hit.
A must-see TV archive
October 26, 2005
Posted by Steve Mosko, President of Sony Pictures Television
One of the things that absolutely blew me away when I came on board last year as chairman of the Television Academy Foundation was the
Archive of American Television
, which is an unequaled collection of videotaped interviews with TV legends.
It's a fantastic resource, and so it drove me crazy that the Archive had over 450 interviews -- but no one could view them if they weren’t actually in Southern California. If a student at a school in Cincinnati or Bangkok wanted to learn more about the history of creative or business aspects of the American television industry, these interviews were just not accessible. So I made it a personal goal to find a way to get the Archive online.
And starting today, anyone in the world can go to
Google Video
and watch
complete and uncut Archive interviews
and learn directly from the legends and pioneers on how it all happened. How cool is that?
It’s been 30 years since I was in college, but I can honestly say that if I were just starting out in this business, I would be all over the Archive. I’m such a fan of television that I can’t wait to be able to watch some of the interviews on Google Video – with the men and women who inspired me, and continue to inspire me. One of the Archive legends now online is former NBC head
Grant Tinker
. Grant helped create “Must See TV” on Thursday nights! There’s also
Norman Lear
,
Ted Turner
,
Steven Bochco
, and so many more. The Archive was created to educate, entertain, and inspire future generations. I challenge you to look up your favorite TV show, learn about a favorite star, or discover more about some of the most important news events of the 20th century. I’m thrilled that the Foundation is finally able to introduce some of these interviews to the world, using the world’s most powerful delivery system – Google. Enjoy!
Update: added URL
Rumor of the day
October 25, 2005
Posted by Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager
You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we're testing, and speculating about our plans. Here's what's really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it's an exciting product, and we'll let you know when there's more news.
Supporting open source
October 25, 2005
Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager
School is a fantastic place to learn, but what if you could introduce students to open source projects, with real problems to solve, and fantastic developers to work with? We thought that would be a pretty terrific way of spending the summer, and with the help of 40 open source, free software and technology-related groups, that is exactly what we did. We call this project the
Summer of Code
.
Organizations like
Apache
and
Samba
and projects such as
Nmap
,
Gaim
and
Internet2
took part in this program.
Together with these partners, we chose 400 students from 49 countries to take part - and this from a pool of 8,744 applicants, so clearly there's no shortage of talent. We contributed nearly $2 million to this effort via $4,500 grants to each of the participants (and a $500 donation per student to the participating organizations).
Nmap's lead developer, Fyodor Vaskovich, told us that Summer of Code developers "made major improvements to the Nmap Security Scanner, including a more powerful graphical interface and a next-generation remote operating system detection framework." To that we say: excellent. Here's a
partial list of participants and projects
, and we even threw together a
map
so people can see how global this program was.
Now that summer is over, we've got a new thing going. Today at the Oregon Governor's office in Salem, we're announcing our support of an open source initiative which two men, Bart Massey and Scott Kveton, at two schools, Oregon State University and Portland State University, have worked very hard to create. Over the last few years, they have collaborated to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide. We're pleased to be able to support their efforts with a donation of $350,000. Here's the
official press release
about this fantastic project.
Guess what just turned 34?
October 21, 2005
Posted by Paul Buchheit, Gmail Engineer
It's difficult to pin down the exact origin of email, but in
October 1971
, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send
the first network email
.
At the time, it must not have seemed very important – nobody bothered to save that first message or even record the exact date. I've always thought that it would be fun to witness a little bit of history like that – to be there when something important happened. That's part of what drove me to join a little no-name startup named Google, and it's why I was excited when I was given a chance to create a new email product, now called Gmail.
Of course that wasn't the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn't working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn't notice the earlier replies. I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email – to build something that would work for me, not against me.
We had a lot of ideas, but first we spent a lot of time talking to all kinds of people about their email. They let us watch over their shoulders and helped us really understand how they use email and what they need from it. We didn't want to simply bolt new features onto old interfaces. We needed to rethink email, but at the same time we needed to respect that email already had over 30 years of history, thousands of existing programs, and nearly a billion users. So we started by learning which features were most important, and which problems were most aggravating. We also realized that solving everyone's problems was too big of a challenge for the first release. It would be better to build a product that a lot of people love, than one that everyone tolerates, and so that was our goal.
On April 1, 2004, we rolled out the first release of Gmail. It immediately became known for giving away 1000 MB of storage, while the others only offered 4 MB, as they had for many years. We didn't do that just for the attention (although we certainly got our share). It's just part of our philosophy. We always want to do as much as we can for our users, and so if we can make something free, we will.
But storage was only the most obvious difference, and our other improvements were just as important. Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the
conversation view
(so now I can finally see all those replies at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as
AJAX
.
This interface included many important features not commonly found on the web at that time, such as email address auto-completion, a slick spell-checker, keyboard shortcuts, and pages that update instantly. It included a smart spam filter to get rid of junk mail. Finally, we made an important new promise: you can keep your Gmail address and all of your email, even if you someday decide that Gmail is not for you. Cell phone owners already have the right to keep their old phone number when switching to a new provider, and you should have that same freedom with email. To ensure this freedom, Gmail provides, for free, both
email forwarding
and
POP download
of all your mail. Many services are now beginning to include other Gmail innovations; we hope that some day they will also be willing to include this one.
Of course, the launch was just the beginning, and we're still busy improving Gmail. We keep increasing free storage (2656 MB and counting), we offer the interface in 38 languages, and we now have features such as
auto-save drafts
, so that you don't accidentally lose that half-written message. We know that Gmail isn’t quite right for everyone yet. We’re working on that too – there’s still more we can do for the folder-lovers and devout-deleters out there. But wait, there’s more! :) We also have a new batch of exciting innovations on the way that we hope will shake things up again and make Gmail even better for even more people.
I'm proud of what we've done so far, and am excited about our future plans for Gmail. So celebrate how far email has come by
joining
its fun future.
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