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Hosted site search for businesses

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Enterprise Search and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search Businesses spend a lot of effort and energy creating and promoting great websites for their products and services, but quality search is often missing. As a result, businesspeople often ask us why they can't use Google to power search on their sites. Today we've released <a href="http://google.com/enterprise/csbe" title="http://google.com/enterprise/csbe">Custom Search Business Edition</a> (CSBE) to do just that. CSBE is a hosted site search solution that provides Google-quality results for your website. It's fast, relevant, reliable, and flexible, so that users can quickly find what they're looking for through search results customized and integrated into your business website. CSBE builds on the Google <a href="http://google.com/coop/cse/" title="http://google.com/coop/cse/">Custom Search Engine</a>, a hosted search solution we introduced last October that allows organizations to create a search engine and search results that are tailored to their point of view. All well and good, but businesses have asked us for greater flexibility and support -- and we're addressing these needs with CSBE. Businesses that want further control over results presentation and integration with their website can obtain results through XML. Now those of you with business sites have the option to turn off ads and have further control over branding. In addition, CSBE provides options for email and phone support. The pricing starts at $100 per year for searching up to 5,000 pages. This offering should be a great help to the millions of businesses that have a web presence but don't offer users any way to search the site. Instead of being left on their own to navigate content, visitors to CSBE-enabled sites will be able to navigate through search results without ever leaving the site. We hope an improved customer search experience will translate into more referrals, more opportunities for e-commerce, and more satisfied online customers for these businesses.<a href="http://google.com/enterprise/csbe">Here's more about CSBE</a>.

Hosted site search for businesses

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Enterprise Search and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search Businesses spend a lot of ef...

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Cookies: expiring sooner to improve privacy

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel We are committed to an ongoing process to improve our privacy practices, and have recently taken a closer look at the question of cookie privacy. How long should a web site "remember" cookie information in its logs after a user's visit? And when should a cookie expire on your computer? Cookie privacy is both a server and a client issue. On the server side, we <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html">recently announced</a> that we will anonymize our search server logs — including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers — after 18 months. Now, we're asking the question about cookie lifetime: when should a cookie expire on your computer? For background: a <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html#cookie">cookie</a> is a very small file which gets stored on your computer All search engines and most websites use cookies. Why? Cookies remind us of your preferences from the last time you visited our site. For example, Google uses our so-called "PREF cookie" to remember our users’ basic preferences, such as the fact that a user wants search results in English, no more than 10 results on a given page, or a SafeSearch setting to filter out explicit sexual content. When we originally designed the PREF cookie, we set the expiration far into the future — in 2038, to be exact — because the primary purpose of the cookie was to preserve preferences, not to let them be forgotten. We were mindful of the fact that users can always go to their browsers to change their cookie management settings, e.g. to delete all cookies, delete specific cookies, or accept certain types of cookies (like first-party cookies) but reject others (like third-party cookies). After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy. In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers. Together, these steps — logs anonymization and cookie lifetime reduction — are part of our ongoing plan to continue innovating in the area of privacy to protect our users.

Cookies: expiring sooner to improve privacy

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel We are committed to an ongoing process to improve our privacy practices, and have recently...

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Nonprofits mix it up with Google Apps

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Director, Google Enterprise Tonight I attended a social mixer co-hosted by Google and the <a href="http://www.nten.org/" target="_blank">Nonprofit Technology Network</a> (NTEN), a nationwide membership organization of several thousand nonprofit technology professionals who want to help nonprofits use technology more effectively. Not only did the event offer DJ Hey Man! -- Darian Rodriguez Heyman, Executive Director of the <a href="http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/">Craigslist Foundation</a> -- the opportunity to show off his skills as a DJ, but it brought together nearly 150 members of nonprofits to hear such speakers as Katrin Verclas of NTEN, and Ami Dar of <a href="http://www.idealist.org/">Idealist.org</a>, plus Camron Assadi, Partnerships Officer for <a href="http://www.mercycorps.org/">Mercy Corps</a>, and Daniel Heath, Network Administrator for the <a href="http://www.ebcrp.org/">East Bay Community Recovery Project</a>, discuss ways in which nonprofits can take advantage of the latest technology trends to support their programs, and their <a href="http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#gov">experiences with Google Apps</a>. The gathering also gave us the chance to announce that we're extending the Google Apps Education Edition to registered nonprofits in the U.S. The idea for this program extension emerged from conversations we had with local nonprofits. We realized that the Education Edition of Google Apps, our hosted suite of communication and collaboration tools -- free for educational institutions -- fits well with the vital need among nonprofits for easy-to-use, flexible technologies requiring little or no investment. We hope such features as email migration, 24/7 assistance and integration APIs, in addition to the standard email, calendaring and online document collaboration tools will enable nonprofits to worry less about technology and focus more on fulfilling their mission -- in whatever field of advocacy, policy, civil, social or environmental welfare (to name a few) they may be. We're always looking for ways in which the technologies we develop can support education and action on the range of global and local issues affecting our world. <a href="http://www.google.com/a/npo">Find out more about Google Apps</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/education/new">apply for an account</a>.

Nonprofits mix it up with Google Apps

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Director, Google Enterprise Tonight I attended a social mixer co-hosted by Google and the Nonprofit Tec...

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Search your blog world

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager What happens when you put together a popular blogging platform, a customizable search experience and a flexible search API? You get a <a href="http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-feature-search-box.html">Search Box widget for Blogger</a>, built using the <a href="http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/2007/07/ajax-search-on-blogger-and-linked.html" title="AJAX Search API">AJAX Search API</a>, and powered by a <a href="http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com/2007/06/custom-search-engine-apis.html" title="Linked Custom Search Engine">Linked Custom Search Engine</a> (CSE). Configure this widget on your Blogger blog and you can immediately search not just your blog posts, but across all the link lists/blogrolls you've set up on your blog and the links you've made from your posts. The widget is now available on <a href="http://draft.blogger.com">Blogger in Draft</a>, Blogger's experimental site. Once you've logged in and configured the widget, visitors to your blog will see a search box there. The search experience inherits your blog's look and feel, and is uniquely flavored around pages you've linked to from your blog. To add the widget: <ol><li> Edit your blog's layout. </li><li> Click on "Add a page element" and configure the "Search Box" widget. </li></ol> Your link lists will automatically show up as optional tabs for your search; you can decide which ones you want to configure. Go ahead -- custom-search-enable your blog! Update: Re-posted with copy written for this blog.

Search your blog world

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager What happens when you put together a popular blogging platform, a customizable search exper...

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Overview of our accessible services

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed. We provide a wide variety of services that are mostly accessed with a web browser. People visit Google from a large number of browsers and platforms; in addition, we also understand that every user is special and may have special needs. Accessibility at Google is about making sure that our services work well for all our users -- independent of your needs and abilities at any given time. Web search, our primary service, has a very simple interface and has always been accessible from a variety of user environments. Newer services that present highly interactive interfaces continue to present accessibility challenges when used with specialized adaptive technologies such as screenreaders. We are committed to finding accessibility solutions that make our services work better for everyone who visits. Here's a list of our accessibility-related services and a few solutions to some accessibility challenges. <a href="http://www.google.com/" title="http://www.google.com"> </a><ul><li><a href="http://www.google.com/" title="http://www.google.com">Web Search</a>: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.<a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible" title="http://labs.google.com/accessible"> </a></li><li><a href="http://labs.google.com/accessible" title="http://labs.google.com/accessible">Accessible Search</a>: Promotes results that are accessible.<a href="http://books.google.com/books" title="http://books.google.com/books"> </a></li><li><a href="http://books.google.com/books" title="http://books.google.com/books">Book Search</a>: Full-text access to public-domain works.<a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/h/" title="http://mail.google.com/mail/h/"> </a></li><li><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/h/" title="http://mail.google.com/mail/h/">Gmail</a>: A simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screenreaders.<a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/x/" title="http://mail.google.com/mail/x/"> </a></li><li><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/x/" title="http://mail.google.com/mail/x/">Gmail Mobile</a>: A lightweight user interface that is also speech-friendly.<a href="http://maps.google.com/?output=html" title="http://maps.google.com/?output=html"> </a></li><li><a href="http://maps.google.com/?output=html" title="http://maps.google.com/?output=html">Google Maps</a>: Easy-to-use textual directions.<a href="https://www.google.com/calendar/m?output=xhtml" title="https://www.google.com/calendar/m?output=xhtml"> </a></li><li><a href="https://www.google.com/calendar/m?output=xhtml" title="https://www.google.com/calendar/m?output=xhtml">Calendar</a>: A functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/audio-captchas-when-visual-images-are.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/audio-captchas-when-visual-images-are.html"> </a></li><li><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/audio-captchas-when-visual-images-are.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/audio-captchas-when-visual-images-are.html">Audio Captchas</a>: All services that use Google Accounts provide an audio alternative for the visual challenge-response tests that are used to distinguish humans from machines.<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/viewing-web-through-mobile-lens.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/viewing-web-through-mobile-lens.html"> </a></li><li><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/viewing-web-through-mobile-lens.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/viewing-web-through-mobile-lens.html">Mobile Transcoder</a>: A mobile lens for viewing the web that produces accessible views.<a href="http://video.google.com/videocaptioned" title="http://video.google.com/videocaptioned"> </a></li><li><a href="http://video.google.com/videocaptioned" title="http://video.google.com/videocaptioned">Google Video</a>: Allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or unfamiliar with the original language.<a href="http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml" title="http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml"> </a></li><li><a href="http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml" title="http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml">Google Talk</a>: IM clients inside a web browser can pose accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html"> </a></li><li><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html" title="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html">Web APIs</a>: Many Google services offer high-level web APIs that aid in authoring mashups; this provides a means for creating highly customized accessible views.</li><li><a href="http://labs.google.com/goog411/">1-800-GOOG-411</a>: Here's an exception to the rule that we deliver most things through a web browser. Our experimental Voice Local Search service lets anyone who can speak into a phone search for a local business by name or category; get connected to the business free of charge; get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. (Just say "text message".)</li></ul>Finally, many Google services such as <a href="http://scholar.google.com/" title="http://scholar.google.com">Google Scholar</a>, <a href="http://news.google.com/" title="http://news.google.com">Google News</a>, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/" title="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/products" title="http://www.google.com/products">Google Product Search</a> work out of the box. While today's screenreaders can hit some bumps on the road when using more advanced features in these products, these web interfaces degrade gracefully to provide a functional interface. If any of this interests you, we invite you to participate in our <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/accessible/" title="http://groups.google.com/group/accessible/">user community</a>. Please tell us what works well, share your own tips on using Google services, and make sure to tell us what could be made even better.Update: Added info on 1-800-GOOG-411. <a href="mailto:raman@google.com" title="mailto:raman@google.com"><raman@google.com></raman@google.com></a>

Overview of our accessible services

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as...

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Bloggin' down under

Posted by Christine Knight, Maximizer Associate, Google Australia To our international friends, Australia can have a rep for Crocodile Dundee jokes, poisonous animals and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_floater">meat pies with mushy peas</a>. What you'll find when you visit the new (ish) <a href="http://google-au.blogspot.com/">Google Australia Blog</a> are the real reasons why Google has made a significant investment in Australia. And right now there's a post explaining the special doodle that was on the Google Australia homepage for NAIDOC Week. Both an engineering and sales support hub, our Aussie team is an eclectic mix of people from all walks of life. We're lucky enough to be the home of the original <a href="http://maps.google.com.au/" title="Google Maps">Google Maps</a> team, so we're at the forefront of global product releases. Aussie Googlers don't take ourselves too seriously, we love a good laugh, we're always happy to make fools of ourselves for a good cause (so long as we're <a href="http://www.cricket.com.au/default.aspx?s=3mobiletestseries-australiavengland" title="beating the Poms">beating the Poms</a> in the Ashes). Visit our blog to read about new product launches for our Australian users, musings on life as an Aussie Googler and what the team gets up to in the community. (Also, stop by if you want to see words like "centre", "maximise" and "humour" spelt correctly). We hope to see you there!

Bloggin' down under

Posted by Christine Knight, Maximizer Associate, Google Australia To our international friends, Australia can have a rep for Crocodile Dunde...

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Welcome, Postini team

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President & General Manager, Google Enterprise We launched <a href="http://www.google.com/a/">Google Apps</a> so that it would be easier for employees to communicate and share information while reducing the hassles and costs associated with enterprise software. Companies are responding: every day, more than 1,000 small businesses sign up for Google Apps. Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they're also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn't a tradeoff that any business should have to make. We realized that we needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community. That's why we're excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire <a href="http://www.postini.com/index.php">Postini</a>, a company that offers security and corporate compliance solutions for email, IM, and other web-based communications. Like Google Apps, Postini's services are entirely hosted, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software. A leader in its field, Postini serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users, and was one of our first partners for Google Apps. Their email and IM management services include inbound and outbound policy management, spam and virus protection, content filtering, message archiving, encryption, and more. We will continue to support Postini's customers and we look forward to the possibilities ahead. Here's the <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/postini_20070709.html">press release</a> announcing the deal, and there's more detail in our <a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/postini_faq.pdf">FAQ</a> and on the <a href="http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2007/07/secure-innovation-postini-joins-google.html">Enterprise blog</a>.

Welcome, Postini team

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President & General Manager, Google Enterprise We launched Google Apps so that it would be easier for emp...

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