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International Science + Engineering Fair

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering You aren't likely to find your standard potato battery project at the International Science and Engineering Fair (<a href="http://sciserv.org/isef/">ISEF</a>), a project of the <a href="http://www.societyforscience.org/index.html">Society for Science & the People</a>. Nor will you see many forced volcano eruptions. You're more likely to notice the 1,200 students from across the world coming together to share projects like "FDIS: A Fast Frequency Distribution Based Interpolation Search Algorithm" and "Probing for Cancer with Smart shRNA." In 2010, the ISEF will return to Silicon Valley, bringing talented young minds together for innovative discussions and projects in San Jose. We're very pleased to be sponsoring this gathering, which will attract promising young minds from more than 40 nations. Since we're committed to engaging talented minds, we will be delighted to give this global community of future scientists the chance to meet and compete. Prizes on offer include more than three million dollars in awards and scholarships, in addition to opportunities for internships and scientific field trips. It's no surprise that this has been called the "Olympics of science fairs" -- we're excited to see what the next generation of scientists and engineers has to offer! And you may wonder why we're telling you about this now, since 2010 seems far off. Budding scientists who want to compete have a lot to do between now and then. Read more about <a href="http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/about/process.asp">the participation process</a>.

International Science + Engineering Fair

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering You aren't likely to find your standard potato battery project at the International Scien...

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Google Finance UK open for business

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager, Google Finance The UK Google Finance site, geared to investors in the UK, is <a href="http://finance.google.co.uk/" id="lwoe">now live</a>. You can access stock prices, mutual funds, financial news, blogs, and charts, all through our easy-to-use and familiar interface. Here are some highlights: <ul><li>Search with a preference for UK companies and mutual funds.</li><li>Google News integration – With a preference for news from British sources. The news is organized in groups by news topic, rather than listed by date, so you won't have to scroll through multiple headlines for the same news story.</li><li>Interactive Charts – Maps market data with corresponding news stories in a single interactive chart, so you can track news to stock performance. You can also click and drag on the charts to see different time periods, and zoom in for more detailed information.</li><li>Front page market summary with FTSE indices and British pound exchange rates.</li><li>Blogs – Incorporates blog postings for related company information from Google Blog Search.</li><li>Discussion Groups – High quality discussion forums are part of the service. We have a team of folks dedicated to keeping the conversation experience free of spam and irrelevant posts. </li><li>Portfolios – A fast and easy way for you to create and track portfolios of stocks and mutual funds in the currency of your choice.</li></ul>Feel free to leave comments on this blog or send us email through the <a href="http://www.google.com/support/finance/" id="cs:_" title="Help Center">Help Center</a>. While we can't respond to all notes, your feedback has a huge impact on how we prioritize new features.

Google Finance UK open for business

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager, Google Finance The UK Google Finance site, geared to investors in the UK, is now live . You can acce...

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Introducing new search views

Posted by Andrew Hogue, Uber Tech Lead Introducing experimental views for search results There have been a lot of recent improvements to web search, but the appearance of results themselves has been pretty constant -- 10 or so web pages in a vertical list. Frequently this is exactly the right format, but for some searches you need more options and more control. That's why we've created our <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental" id="u5_h" title="experimental search page">experimental search page</a> to let you try out some of our newest ideas. You may have noticed our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-scenes-with-universal-search.html">"alternative views" experiment</a> showcased last May. This lets you visualize your search results in new ways, and we'd like to highlight some of the features we've recently added. Map view Suppose you're scouring the web trying to find out about <a href="http://www.google.com/views?q=math+conferences+view%3Amap&vwwh=california+&btnGm=Search">math conferences happening in your state</a>. Or you'd like to sit back and enjoy some <a href="http://www.google.com/views?q=good+jazz+view%3Amap&vwwh=manhattan">jazz around town</a>. This information is on the web and accessible through regular web search, but probably spread out over many sites and pages. Unless one of these pages has a map, it might be hard to visualize all the locations at once. Map view solves this problem by plotting some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map. After scrolling or zooming the map, try clicking on the "Update Results" button near the top left corner of the map to show more results just in the area you're looking at. Timeline view Timeline view does the same thing as map view, but for dates found on the web. This includes dates of <a href="http://www.google.com/views?q=biophysics+conferences+view%3Atimeline&vwdr=2008">upcoming</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/views?q=world+war+ii+view%3Atimeline">historic</a> events, or even <a href="http://www.google.com/views?q=richard+feynman+view%3Atimeline">biographical information</a> -- all generated automatically from your search results. The graph across the top of the page summarizes how dates in your results are spread through time, with higher bars representing a larger number of unique dates. Click anywhere on the graph to zoom in to that particular period of time, and use the text box to the right to specify any range of years, months, or days. Much as in map view, the results below the graph emphasize the dates contained on each page. Info view Info view is a bit different. It doesn't dramatically change the visualization of results; web pages are still displayed vertically as usual. Now you'll notice a new control panel on the right side of the page: <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnO6L3tk4geVXv9EmfGhsmY35tefPUZ3dEpCiNWolAQjPUfMswW3MgKg8XMT2k4fMtnm9qjNkE8RMManobPdAc6mfWbhVMCsG0qJe7c6U5e68ogUDvg6H_uise8gypYD7JmPDfcbJlfJs/s1600/SEARCH-VIEW3.gif" /> <img alt="" src="file:///Users/benjaminc/Desktop/SEARCH-VIEW4.jpg" />Clicking on the different options in the panel changes the information shown below each result. Usually we show some text from the page that includes a few of the words you searched for. Now you can instead reveal text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images. For example, selecting "dates" from the control panel reveals the date of the Sputnik launch in the first result for "space exploration": <div id="s635" style="padding: 1em 0pt; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: right;"><img src="https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/File?id=cgqmq8g4_47ctq8nwgr" style="width: 550px; height: 73px;" /> </div> And selecting "images" from the control panel displays some nice images from the page: <div id="h2lt" style="padding: 1em 0pt; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/File?id=cgqmq8g4_48hrw877ct" style="width: 461px; height: 147px;" /> </div> If you run a search and find many of your results are looking similar, try using info view. It may highlight the differences between results and help you select the best page for your needs. Tell us what you think You can opt in to the alternative views experiments so they become your main search UI -- as well as try out many other new search tools -- on the <a href="http://www.google.com/experimental">experimental search page</a>. After opting in, send us feedback by clicking on the experiment name in the upper right part of the search page and selecting "Take our survey". We'd love to hear your thoughts!</div></div>

Introducing new search views

Posted by Andrew Hogue, Uber Tech Lead Introducing experimental views for search results There have been a lot of recent improvements to web...

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Three more languages for Blogger

Posted by Tyrone Nicholas, Software Engineer Millions of people around the world already use <a href="http://www.blogger.com/" id="gza." title="Blogger">Blogger</a> to participate in the wider Internet community. Blogging is a powerful way for people to publish online, reach a large and varied audience, and communicate with others who share their interests. And today, Blogger is available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. This brings the number of languages we offer to 40. We've been really excited about adding these languages and widening the world of bloggers. We're especially pleased that Blogger now supports composing text and displaying blogs right to left. This has long been an challenge for bloggers in Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. We've added <a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/01/three-new-languages-and-whole-new.html" id="a6:0" title="Blogger Buzz">new features</a> specifically for these users, and also made sure every page of the Blogger application displays right-to-left in these languages. This project has been very technically challenging, but among the most thrilling I've ever worked on. I hope that everyone enjoys using it as much as I've enjoyed developing it.

Three more languages for Blogger

Posted by Tyrone Nicholas, Software Engineer Millions of people around the world already use Blogger to participate in the wider Internet c...

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Celebrating data privacy

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel; Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel; and Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust and Safety Last year, the Council of Europe had a great idea. Based on polling that showed that 70% of Europeans did not understand how their personal data was being protected, the Council decided to hold the first annual Data Protection Day on January 28, 2007. Privacy experts visited schools and universities, launched information campaigns, and held press conferences in locations throughout Europe, informing and educating consumers about their personal data rights and protections. Lack of understanding about data protection on the Internet is not only a European issue, it's a global one. As more and more personal information comes online every day, it's increasingly important that users all over the world understand both the benefits and potential risks of online data sharing, and the tools at their disposal to control and manage the data they share online. In recognition of the global importance of data protection, the U.S. and Canada have joined 27 European countries to celebrate <a href="https://www.privacyassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1329&Itemid=138">Data Privacy Day 2008</a> this Monday, January 28th. As part of the day's events, we'll join legal scholars, privacy professionals, and government officials from Europe and the U.S. at an international data privacy <a href="http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/ces/" id="tn3n" title="conference">conference</a> being held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We'll also contribute to efforts to raise awareness and promote understanding of data privacy issues by releasing the third <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=XfZLztx8cKI" id="q5nq" title="video">video</a> in our privacy series ("Google Privacy: A Look at Cookies") on our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/googleprivacy" id="fsfg" title="YouTube privacy channel">YouTube Privacy Channel</a>. This video offers a closer look at how cookies work and how web sites and advertisers use them to personalize our online experiences. We've also developed a <a href="https://services.google.com/blog_resources/google_privacy_booklet.pdf" id="q9sg" title="privacy pamphlet">privacy booklet</a> (pdf-web version coming soon!) that you can download to get an in-depth look at our privacy practices and approach, and have co-sponsored the creation of <a href="https://www.privacyassociation.org/images/stories/pdfs/DPD08_TeenPrivacyOnline_slides.pdf" id="k:u1" title="educational materials">educational materials</a> on teen online privacy for parents and educators. The goal of all these efforts is to help educate you about online data privacy so that you can make more informed choices about how you use online products and services. We hope that you'll take a few minutes on Monday to learn something new, and that Data Privacy Day reinforces existing global efforts to educate consumers about online data collection, use, and protection.

Celebrating data privacy

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel; Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel; and Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager ...

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Gmail in your words

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager Since launching Gmail in 2004, we've always supported the idea that email should be useful, fast, reliable, and fun. But instead of just hearing what we think about Gmail, we wanted to hear from you. So we <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-your-story.html" id="i2ub" title="recently invited">recently invited</a> Gmail fans to share stories about how you're using it in unique and productive ways. Turns out that you're a creative bunch, and we got the <a href="http://youtube.com/video_response_view_all?v=R1epyJsRnBM">video submissions</a> (and 1500+ emails) to prove it. With so many stories to choose from, we decided to put them all together and showcase a bit of everything you had to say. To check out the collaborative video and some of the email stories we received, head to <a href="http://www.gmail.com/yourstory" id="bkqs" title="gmail.com/yourstory">gmail.com/yourstory</a>. You might even discover a new way to use Gmail that you'd never considered. <object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/LS0CrSq_Ip8&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/LS0CrSq_Ip8&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object> We always love hearing from you, so if you still have a story to share <a href="http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=story" id="bba5" target="_blank" title="give us a shout">give us a shout</a>.

Gmail in your words

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager Since launching Gmail in 2004, we've always supported the idea that emai...

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Public transit made easy

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. A little over a year ago, I blogged about <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/speech-friendly-textual-directions.html" id="r7wx" title="our simple textual directions">our simple textual directions</a> as an alternative to the popular graphical Google Maps interface. Those directions help me orient myself and learn my way around. But in the interest of safety -- my own and others! -- I choose not to drive and rely heavily on public transportation. Now that Maps has textual directions in place, it's easy to build on top of that interface to introduce new innovations that become immediately useful to someone like me. <a href="http://www.maps.google.com/transit">Google Transit</a> is a great example of this -- it helps me locate public transportation options and does so in the text format that I need. In addition, it offers several nice features to help me plan my trip: <ul><li> I can specify the desired departure or arrival time.</li><li> It will show more than one trip choice, allowing some flexibility with respect to when I'd like to start.</li><li> It estimates the amount of walking required to get to a transit stop/station.</li><li> It identifies the length of waiting at each transit point.</li><li> It estimates the comparable cost of transportation options, where available.</li></ul>But these aren't the only benefits. Behind the scenes is the <a href="http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html" target="_blank">Google Transit Feed Specification</a> (GTFS), an open data format used by public transit agencies to upload their data. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds" id="w5r9" title="Several agencies">Several agencies</a> are already using these public feeds. Though GTFS is never seen by commuters directly, it opens up a wealth of possibilities with respect to accessibility and alternative access, such as building custom user interfaces and specialized route guidance applications that are optimized for people with special needs. Though we added this alternative view to enhance the accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, we hope that everyone finds it a useful addition to your commute arsenal. So next time you use the Maps graphical interface, give its cousin, the simple textual directions, a try -- there might be times when you find yourself using it even if you can see. And here's to ever more open data feeds from the various public transport agencies!

Public transit made easy

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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