More than meets the eye

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Ardan Arac, Associate Product Manager, Search Quality</span><br /><br />We're very excited to unveil Plus Box, a new search feature that lets you see more information about individual search results. Whenever you see the plus box icon - <img alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044082300556169442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk7DbE3wBi_GG-iXsSikaeEixzFPvtYEu842U7H1Bqz-d6RbE45YZd7iMjiMUtDGb5NFDJ3vJ4mk6Hg-Fu9mKtfBoE2BHSip2KQmjPZxEzZrvqRgNCH-AnFV2Z0_NxdLVpEug0uRp9ruI/s200/plus_sm.gif" /> - click on it to see the additional rich data expand below the original search result. <span><span>With Plus Box, you'll get a visual snapshot of related information, so it is faster and easier to find exactly what you're looking for</span></span>.<br /><br />Right now, we're showing two types of Plus Box results: stock information and maps. You can find a plus box next to the home pages of companies listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Clicking the plus box icon for any of these companies displays the latest stock price, chart, and company information. Searching for stock prices on Google becomes much easier—for example, look up <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple&btnG=Search">Apple</a> to find their stock information next to Apple's corporate home page. If you want to see a more detailed company profile, click on "More information" to go to <a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AAPL">Google Finance</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj03xK7nvOjXASXr-OivIGSkaaIuudIZ4n-e2aNtOVGq2sQHq_ICTu8x2ko1dfi5bbLdWqVWE4Imm7oozxTeuyVGHH8sVRycn068QqXUF3xM_RuQHkzcCdg5_Z6ypWEZMh5S6fDBRF7gXY/s1600-h/apple.jpg"><img alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044083417247666434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj03xK7nvOjXASXr-OivIGSkaaIuudIZ4n-e2aNtOVGq2sQHq_ICTu8x2ko1dfi5bbLdWqVWE4Imm7oozxTeuyVGHH8sVRycn068QqXUF3xM_RuQHkzcCdg5_Z6ypWEZMh5S6fDBRF7gXY/s400/apple.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><br />You'll also find Plus Box results when a business comes up in search results and we are able to map its address. The Plus Box link tells you the address of the business and clicking the icon or the link shows you the address on a map. To see this at work, search for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=babbo&btnG=Google+Search">Babbo</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKKTPfpBrdNZsYSa698SV-TtaO1rArU3lXCXej1D6pYilQbzJSXZKrPuiEySyKf_EvugT8iEwXPUL_6O6u7c5Vwjg29aiUOnGviM-BVKckxA9bezdclMgQMyJ305_oIHH-k_nopZyITaQ/s1600-h/babbo+copy.jpg"><img alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044083640585965842" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKKTPfpBrdNZsYSa698SV-TtaO1rArU3lXCXej1D6pYilQbzJSXZKrPuiEySyKf_EvugT8iEwXPUL_6O6u7c5Vwjg29aiUOnGviM-BVKckxA9bezdclMgQMyJ305_oIHH-k_nopZyITaQ/s400/babbo+copy.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><br />You won't see this feature yet for all businesses, but we're working hard to increase its availability. If you're a business owner and would like to see something like this associated with your website, <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=52171&ctx=sibling">here's how</a> to get your information to us.<br /><br />We'll be using Plus Box for other kinds of information in the future, so stay tuned and keep an eye out for the <img alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044082300556169442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk7DbE3wBi_GG-iXsSikaeEixzFPvtYEu842U7H1Bqz-d6RbE45YZd7iMjiMUtDGb5NFDJ3vJ4mk6Hg-Fu9mKtfBoE2BHSip2KQmjPZxEzZrvqRgNCH-AnFV2Z0_NxdLVpEug0uRp9ruI/s200/plus_sm.gif" />.

More than meets the eye

Posted by Ardan Arac, Associate Product Manager, Search Quality We're very excited to unveil Plus Box, a new search feature that lets yo...

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Personality goes a long way

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Jessica Ewing, Product Manager</span><br /><br />Whenever I get a new cell phone, the first thing I do is change the background theme. It seems like such a small thing, but for whatever reason adding a beach or a dancing pig or something else makes me feel like it's my own.<br /><br />We wanted to offer you a way to add some personality to your Google homepage, too, but we had to ask ourselves some tough questions. How do we add personality without taking away from the information? How do we make sure people don't get sick of looking at the same theme every day?<br /><br />Today we're releasing six themes for the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig">personalized homepage</a> <personalized> that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute -- this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season. If you add the beach theme, for example (changes with time of day), it will ask you for your Zip code and adjust itself to match your local sunrise and sunset times. So if you happen to be stuck in a <windowless><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space">windowless office</a>, you can at least crack open a cold one and watch the sun set over your desktop.<br /><br />You can add a theme by first setting up a personalized homepage. One your homepage is set up, click the "Select Theme" link on the right-hand side of the page. From there you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes we've designed. We hope this feature makes the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.<br /><br />We implemented our themes using a CSS framework so we can scale, and plan to push out many new themes beyond these six. So <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Personalizing/topics">tell us</a><tell> what themes you want to see.</tell></windowless></personalized>

Personality goes a long way

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Product Manager Whenever I get a new cell phone, the first thing I do is change the background theme. It seems like...

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Google Apps now south of the Sahara

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team</span><br /><br />Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to using <a href="http://www.google.com/a/edu/">Google Apps</a>. As a result of two separate partnerships that <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/apps_rwanda.html">we've signed today</a> with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the <a title="http://www.nur.ac.rw/" href="http://www.nur.ac.rw/">National University of Rwanda</a>, the <a title="http://www.kie.ac.rw/" href="http://www.kie.ac.rw/">Kigali Institute for Education</a> and the <a title="http://www.kist.ac.rw/index_2.html" href="http://www.kist.ac.rw/index_2.html">Kigali Institute for Science and Technology</a>, plus 50,000 more from Kenya's <a title="http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/" href="http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/">University of Nairobi</a>, are joining their colleagues at <a href="http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/02/google.html">Northwestern</a>, <a href="http://www.asu.edu/news/stories/200610/20061010_asugmail.htm">ASU</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html">around the world</a> with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university's domain for free.<br /><br />Offering Google Apps in Africa means more to us than connecting students and teachers to conduct that special exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity so unique to universities (<a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html">we should know</a>). In Africa and in the developing world, it also means doing our part to make sure that everyone has access to the same services wherever they live, whatever their language, and regardless of income.<br /><br />We can't be more delighted about our Google Apps partnerships with Rwanda and Kenya, and there are more to come.

Google Apps now south of the Sahara

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to...

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Let the passion continue! We're acquiring Adscape

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games</span><br /><br />Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an arcade? I would line up behind at least 6 people for my chance at Asteroids.<br /><br />Time warp—now it's 2007. Games can be played anywhere and at anytime. In this mobile world, games have evolved to become a part of our lives. Unlike television, gamers can make games their own—customizing their experience in new ways—and we are helping them do that big time.<br /><br />But of course developing these sophisticated games can be very expensive. Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.<br /><br />Our charge at Adscape has always been to honor the game that was developed and find new ways to enable that game to continue so others can enjoy it. That's why we are so stoked <a href="http://www.google.com/press/annc/annc_adscape.html">to join Google</a>—because these guys get it, and are committed to helping us continue our mission.

Let the passion continue! We're acquiring Adscape

Posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an a...

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A world in motion

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience</span><br /><br />Mark Twain said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." We're pretty sure Twain's definition of pliable is different from ours. Building flexibility into search, email, and other Google products is critically important as we seek to organize the world's information, and it's only natural that we should continue to look for ways to make the use of such statistics more "pliable" as well.<br /><br /><div style="direction: ltr;"><span>In this regard, we are excited to announce that we have acquired</span> Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, and we welcome the Trendalyzer team to Google. Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel<span> effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations.</span> In its nimble hands, Trendalyzer views development data—such as regional income distribution or trends in global health—as <a href="http://tools.google.com/gapminder/">literally a world of opportunity</a>. Like Google, Gapminder strives to make information more useful, and Trendalyzer will improve any function or application in which data might be better visualized.<br /></div><br />Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.<br /><br />That's our definition of "pliable." Please stay tuned, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can.

A world in motion

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience Mark Twain said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable...

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Webmasters, Google Sprechen Deutsch

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vanessa Fox</span><br /><br />We love our webmaster community, and with <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters">Webmaster Central</a>, we provide as much information and interaction about how Google crawls and indexes websites<span> as we can, in 18 languages. We also regularly provide information and tips in our <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/brand-new-german-webmaster-central.html">webmaster blog</a>. The blog has been available only in English. Until now. We're very happy to launch our first non-English webmaster blog: the <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral-de.blogspot.com/">German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog</a>. If you speak German, head there to read German versions of the English blog posts, as well as news and tips specifically for the German market. Willkommen!

Webmasters, Google Sprechen Deutsch

Posted by Vanessa Fox We love our webmaster community, and with Webmaster Central , we provide as much information and interaction about how...

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Three summers of open source

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager</span><br /><br />Everything is ready. All systems are go. We're now accepting applications for the third <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/">Google Summer of Code</a>, Google's program for introducing college students to open source software development.<br /><br />Not everyone knows it, but open source plays an enormous role at Google. Each time you use the Google search engine, you're using open source software. Google relies on the Linux kernel, GCC, python and Samba and commits code into each of those projects.<br /><br />We also work closely with the open source developer community. Googlers have released hundreds of thousands of lines of code, both as patches to existing projects and as new and wholly open source projects, such as the <a href="http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/">Google Web Toolkit</a>. We've funded <a href="http://osuosl.org/info/sponsors">great work at universities</a> and we host many thousands of active open source projects on <a href="http://code.google.com/">code.google.com</a>'s project hosting facility. Just shy of a year old, this hosting system has become one of the largest online development communities ever developed, second only to our friends at <a href="http://sourceforge.net/">SourceForge.Net</a>.<br /><br />But back to the Google Summer of Code. Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.<br /><br />Many of our former students are still actively involved with their mentoring organizations. <a href="http://www.webchick.net/">Angela Byron</a>, for example, started working with the Drupal project during Google <a href="http://code.google.com/summerofcode05.html">Summer of Code 2005</a>; she went on to become an organization administrator for the project for Google Summer of Code 2006 and now sits on the board of the newly created <a href="http://www.drupal.org/">Drupal Association</a>. Other students, such as <a href="http://steffenpingel.de/">Steffen Pingel</a>, have been voted in as committers to their projects. Steffen began working with the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/">Eclipse Mylar</a> project for Google <a href="http://code.google.com/soc/2006/">Summer of Code 2006</a> and was voted in as a committer just as he was completing his project work. Still others have gone on to internships or full-time jobs with us or other companies, including IBM and NetApp, or have even started their own consulting businesses.<br /><br />This year we're happy to say that we're expanding the program to accommodate an additional 200 students and some additional open source organizations. If you're a college student who'd like to program over the summer for the good of open source, <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/guide-to-the-gsoc-web-app-for-student-applicants">we're taking applications until March 24</a>. We look forward to seeing yours!

Three summers of open source

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager Everything is ready. All systems are go. We're now accepting applications for the th...

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