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Don't miss this chance to prove yourself
August 31, 2006
Posted by Jeanne Williams, Staffing Programs
There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam 2006. So far, about 16,000 competitors have signed up to show off their programming skills -- and perhaps win an all-expenses paid trip to our New York City engineering office to compete in the finals on October 27. The winner gets $10,000 and global bragging rights: people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary -- you get the idea.
The top 100 finalists will be flown to NYC to show us what they've got. Have you got what it takes to Code Jam? Then by all means
register here
.
Download the classics
August 30, 2006
Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search
Starting today, you can go to
Google Book Search
and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles -- from well-known classics to obscure gems.
Before the rise of the public library -– a story chronicled in this 1897 edition of
The Free Library
– access to large collections of books was the privilege of a wealthy minority. Now, with the help of our wonderful
library partners
, we're able to offer you the ability to download and read PDF versions of out-of-copyright books from some of the world’s greatest collections.
Using Google Book Search, you can find
The Free Library
and many other extraordinary old books, such as:
* Ferriar's
The Bibliomania
* A futurist from 1881's
1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
* Aesop's
Fables
* Shakespeare's
Hamlet
* Abbott's
Flatland
* Hugo's
Marion De Lorme
* Dunant's
Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
* Bolívar's
Proclamas
* Dante's
Inferno
To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, simply select the "Full view" radio button when you search on
books.google.com
. (Please note that we do not enable downloading of any book currently under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only small snippets of text –- at most, two or three sentences surrounding your search term -– to help you determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for.)
Of course, this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world's books -- whether rare, common, popular or obscure -- people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search.
Get your people talking
August 28, 2006
Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Manager, Google Apps for Your Domain
Back in February, we
blogged
about an experiment called "Gmail for your domain" that enabled IT administrators to power their custom domain email with Gmail with 2GB of storage, powerful search tools, and other Gmail features to all of their users. Since then, we've been listening to feedback from thousands of small businesses, K-12 schools, non-profits, universities, even families with their own websites, and based on what they've suggested, we've added so many features that the original name just didn't describe the service accurately any longer.
So say hello to
Google Apps for Your Domain
, a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.
We think we may be on to something here: all the functionality of Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar wrapped up with tools to make them work for your organization, plus Google Page Creator for designing and publishing your website. There's no hardware or software required, and you can customize the user interfaces with your branding and color scheme, so they look and feel like your own.
Things have come a long way in the last six months, and we're still working on the service. If you're from a larger business or university with more advanced needs for communications and sharing, please
get in touch
regarding premium versions of the service, due out later this year.
We love you, webmasters
August 24, 2006
Posted by Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central, and Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist
We always aim to offer our users relevant and helpful results, and webmasters provide the great content that we point to. Unfortunately -- though we've had the pleasure of chatting with many of you in a variety of forums, around the blogosphere, and at many conferences across the world -- we simply haven't been able to interact with every one of you. So we're excited to announce our new
Google Webmaster Central
, which enables us to have productive conversations with many more of you, all the time.
Recently, we've added:
A new
Webmaster Central blog
, where you'll find lots of information about how we crawl and index sites.
An expanded
Webmaster Help Google Group
featuring helpful conversations with other webmasters and Googlers.
Tons of new and updated
FAQs.
Furthermore, Google Sitemaps has been renamed
Google webmaster tools
. It's more than a new coat of paint; we've added and improved lots of geeky goodies to help give you more info and control.
For those of you who've already established a Google sitemap, have no fear: the
Sitemaps protocol
remains unchanged and Sitemaps submission mechanisms and reporting is still available from the Sitemaps tab. If you haven't already added a Sitemap, you might want to
learn more about it
. (In short, putting a Sitemap file on your site enables you to tell us
what
pages your site has,
which
of them are most important, and
how often
they are typically updated.)
You've worked hard on your sites, and, not surprisingly, you want to make sure they're listed appropriately in Google, so of course you have lots of questions. You can find many answers simply by creating a
Google webmaster tools account
(if you have a Google Account, you're already set), adding your site URL to your account, and verifying that you own the site. A few of the many things you can do with webmaster tools:
Tell us if you'd
prefer your site's URLs to be indexed with the www or without
.
View any
errors we had crawling your site
.
See an
analysis of your robots.txt file
and a way to test changes to it.
See what
searches bring up your site
in the results and what position the site shows up.
Request reinclusion
of your site if you're previously violated the webmaster guidelines.
We've also put together a comprehensive webmaster help center to answer more of your questions, such as:
What are Google's webmaster guidelines
?
How can I improve my site's ranking
?
Why doesn't my site show up for a specific keyword
?
My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site
?
What's a "supplemental result"
?
With our webmaster tools and webmaster help center, we're able to tackle an increasing number of questions and make the answers available to
all
webmasters. But we're not planning to rest on our laurels. We're listening to your concerns (in person and all over the Net!) and working hard to expand the content and languages of our help center. We appreciate the webmaster community very much, and look forward to many great conversations to come. We couldn't do search without you.
Happy birthday, Google Talk!
August 24, 2006
Posted by Lewis Lin, Product Marketing Manager, Google Talk
A year ago today, we launched
Google Talk
. On the days leading up to launch, we spent long summer nights fueled by
Reza's
eclectic play list. Thankfully, Google Talk didn't have
Music Trends
back then. The team listened to everything from 2Pac to Ludacris to Biggie.
We want to thank all the users who have submitted product feedback. We'd also like to thank the millions of users who are using the Google Talk network – either through the
Google Talk client
,
Gmail chat
, or
other supported clients
. Our users love the chat integration within Gmail, and we're planning to make it easier to chat with your buddies through other Google services.
Want to send us a birthday message? Leave us a
voicemail
at talkbirthday@gmail.com.
MEEP.
Finding the wealth in your library (and everyone else's)
August 24, 2006
Posted by Bruno Fonseca, Google Brazil
As a student and then as a researcher, I used to haunt libraries in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I spent time looking for the books I needed, but also happened to find gems by chance, as I scanned the shelves I walked by. Fun as it was to find an unexpected treasure, I always knew that much remained hidden. Large libraries are way too big to just walk around and browse, even for an enthusiastic teenager.
Today, we're launching the Library Catalog Search feature in Google Book Search, designed to help casual readers and bookworms everywhere find gems in the libraries around the world. Queries on
Google Book Search
will automatically include results from library catalogs when appropriate. Each result includes a "Find Libraries" link to help readers find libraries that hold the book -- ideally a library nearby, or if need be, a library far away. For example, after reading
Martin Gardner's book
Fads and Fallacies
, I wanted to follow up on
Immanuel Velikovsky's books
about scientific explanations for biblical miracles. Clicking on the "Find Libraries" link for Velikovsky's
Worlds in Collision
, I found that a copy was available in the University of Sao Paulo library.
This is true of many types of books in countries all over the world -- my colleagues in Google's Zurich office tell me about being able to find
Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets
for their nephews and nieces. In many cases, it's even possible to click through to the local library and reserve the book.
For this feature, we have worked with more than 15 library union catalogs that have information about libraries from more than 30 countries, as well as with our colleagues working on
Google Scholar
(which includes a similar feature just for scholarly books).
We would like to acknowledge and fete our partners who have collected information about the wealth in world's libraries with amazing thoroughness and care. And we're looking to work with union catalogs in other parts of the world so it can be just as easy for library patrons elsewhere to learn what their libraries have waiting for them.
If you're a library patron and can't find the books you're looking for, ask your local library to participate in this program. If you are a librarian at a union catalog and would like to work with us to help users find books in your collections, please
contact us
.
Here's hoping readers worldwide will use this to discover and explore the wonderful collections in the world's libraries.
Calendar and Notifier for the Mac
August 23, 2006
Posted by David Oster, Software Engineer-Mac Clients
Creating a better user experience for
Google Calendar
on a Mac was my first project at Google. So I'm excited to tell you that Google Calendar now works great in Safari, and we've just launched a major Mac-only upgrade for the Gmail Notifier.
The
Google Notifier
for the Mac has:
Notifications for upcoming events and unread mail
Built-in pop up notifications
Custom sounds
As always, great new icons
So start keeping track of your life with
Google Calendar
and the
Google Notifier
.
By the way, since we put this out there last Friday, we've already received a lot of feedback, which we've used to fix some bugs. So keep the comments coming! We want to make the Google Notifier even better.
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