Google News Updates

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from easy text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these innovative features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we just update your browsers as soon as possible. There are many choices:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+

Mozilla Firefox 3.0+

Google Chrome 4.0+

Safari 3.0+

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. Google is also going to begin phasing out their support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers. 2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps.

About 18 months ago, Google published a graph presenting that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The increase since then has been even more dramatic.

Web pages can use a diversity of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only symbolize a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. Google had long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text they search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.

This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that we cover.This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that Google covers.

This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that we cover.

Searching for "nancials"?

Unicode is growing both in practice and in character coverage. Google recently upgraded to the newest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic attention, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.

Google is constantly improving thier handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, particularly generated PDF documents.

But no longer — after widespread testing, Google just newly turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. Google is recognizing this day by openly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.

• Use information to provide the users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

Google has been always operating with these principles in mind. Now, they have just put them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective.

You can find out more about Google’s efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.

Google is excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most recurrently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.

Extensions permit you to add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting instructions or shopping.

Google previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many latest extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in google extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.

Bookmark sync is a handy attribute for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you generate a bookmark on one computer, it's mechanically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually reconstruct the bookmark each time you switch computers.

You can read more about stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — Google is working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).

If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these latest features a whirl.

Google has launched the second version of its Google Voice extension for Chrome which includes innovative click-to-call functionality and easier access to voicemail messages.

The Google Voice extension, released on Friday, adds a button to the toolbar which displays the number of unread messages in a user’s Google Voice inbox – speeding access to their voicemails, which have been transcribed by Google’s speech recognition engine.

The button will also tell users if they have any latest messages and with a click will allow users to make a call, check messages or send a free text message, according to Google.

However, one of the most practical features for Google Voice users on Chrome will be the click-to-call functionality which allows users to just click on any number viewed in the browser to call that number directly from within the browser, if required

The calls will be made from any phones the user has already set up on Google Voice.

Users can download the latest extension from the Google Chrome Extensions page – the voice icon will appear to the right of the search bar without the need for a restart.

Google said it is working on voicemail playback functionality, which will be coming in the near future. The web giant also celebrated that the extension on Macs is still relatively buggy, while switching between tabs in the extension pop up will cause a few problems, as the popup doesn’t mechanically resize to fit at present. Both issues are being worked on.

Last year at our second Searchology event, Gaoogle announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets, two approaches to improve search by better understanding the web. Now Google is kicking off the new year with two improvements based on those technologies. First, they are applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new "answer-highlighting" feature to search, and second expanding Rich Snippets to include events.

Answer highlighting in search results

Most information on the web is shapeless. For example, blogs put together paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their individual formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is hard for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to combine and understand information on the web.

Google Squared is one of the early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. The research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called "answer highlighting."

Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the probable answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with accurate answers. If the pages returned for these queries enclose a simple answer, the search snippet will more often consist of the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

Consider the example, [empire state height]. The earlier search result used to look like this:

With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This kind of quick answer only makes sense for definite kinds of searches. For example, the respond to [history of france] can't readily fit in a search snippet. Answer highlighting is rolling out during the next couple days on google.com in English.

Rich Snippets for events

Sometimes the easiest way to recognize somebody is by having a conversation. The web is similar. A huge way to understand web pages is to simply ask webmasters to teach us (and other search engines) about their content. To that end, we maintain to make improvements to our search results with Rich Snippets, enabling webmasters to annotate pages with structured data in a standard format.

So far Google has launched improved search result snippets for reviews and people. When your search results enclose web pages with review information, you might see the number of user reviews on the page and the average rating in the search result. When your search contains a public outline page about a person from a social networking site, you may see the person's location and occupation, or a list of her friends.

Google has announced support for a new Rich Snippets format for events. The new format improves search results by counting links to specific event names, dates and locations. Here's an example of a latest event result from livenation.com if you search for [irving plaza]:

The new result format provides a fast and suitable way to identify pages with events and click directly to the ones you find interesting. If you're into Hip Hop Karaoke, you can rapidly find out when and where the next show is in Irving Plaza, and click for more info.Check out blog post on Webmaster Central for more details.

The property at Drewsteignton is one of 20 National Trust properties and landscapes which are now seen on the website. Over 20 historic locations across the UK - including castles, landscapes and country houses - have been scanned by means of a panoramic camera, bolted to the back of a tricycle, and added to Google's online mapping service.

The images give a 360 degree ground level tour of the outside of the National Trust sites through a tour at www.maps. google.co.uk/streetview.

Property manager David Bailey said: "Google Street View will allow even more people to see what the castle has to suggest.

"It's incredible to think that people from around the world, who might never be able to travel to the UK, will be able to benefit from a virtual visit to D rogo."

Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist from Google, said: "Places like Castle Drogo suggest all of us a special glimpse of the history, nature and architecture up and down the country.

"We were delighted to be able to open up some of the UK's most renowned landmarks to the rest of the world, via the web."

Cricket matches from the Indian Premier League (IPL) may be shown on YouTube after details of a probable deal with Google emerged this week. According to media reports, the Board of Control for Cricket will publicize the partnership on Wednesday.

The details of the deal are said to signify that live matches will be broadcast on YouTube in countries where the TV rights have not been sold.

This would include the UK following the collapse of Setanta which used to seize the TV and internet rights to the competition.

YouTube broadcast IPL highlights last year and has more recently shown significant events like a live U2 concert.

Reports about the deal claim that this year's IPL, which begins 12 March, will be broadcast on YouTube but precise details about territories have not yet been announced.

Gmail has always been extensively under attack, however, most of the times user’s accounts are compromised because of phishing, rather than because of the lack of security at Gmail.

HTTPS or HTTP_Secure, is a protected way of transmitting data to and fro on the web. Unlike HTTP, HTTPS data is encrypted before a transfer occurs. This makes data transferred via HTTPS hard to snoop on, and allows users a safer way to browse the web.

Gmail did have an alternative for users to use HTTPS as default, through a Gmail Labs feature. Google has now graduated the feature out of labs. This means that all Gmail users will now mechanically start using HTTPS by default. Users have an option to disable HTTPS by default by visiting “Settings -> Labs” and choosing “Don’t always use https”

With relief efforts underway, many displaced Haitians and their friends and families around the world are extremely concerned about the safety and whereabouts of loved ones. In retort to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can propose information about missing persons and to search the database.

You'll find this gadget on our Haiti earthquake response website and on the State Department website. In order to stop the proliferation of multiple missing persons databases (a big problem during Hurricane Katrina), Google has made the People Finder gadget standards-based and easily embeddable on any website (see here for instructions). The gadget is at present available in English, French and Creole.

Google is also helping families in the U.S. stay connected with their loved ones in Haiti by offering free calls to Haiti for the next two weeks via Google Voice. If you don't have a Google Voice account already, apply for an invitation at www.google.com/voice.

For anyone interested in viewing updated imagery in Google Earth, Google has now included GeoEye's shots in the Historical Imagery feature. Now you can see the imagery without downloading the KML file and can use the time slider to easily compare the stark before-and-after images, such as those below. To help relief organizations, GeoEye has made professional-quality files of the recent satellite imagery of Haiti downloadable via our earthquake response website. The imagery in this format will be important to GIS organizations and aid workers.

Google has also made Haiti Map Maker data publicly accessible for download for non-commercial use and attribution. Data can be used by relief workers to do things such as make offline maps, merge data sets and run analysis, all of which we hope will help with their efforts on the ground.

News and user footage continues to roll into YouTube. Oxfam and the American Red Cross are even responding to contributions by uploading videos that show viewers accurately where their donations are making a difference.

In contrast to the unusually early spike of flu activity we saw this October, Google Flu Trends is at present showing a low level of activity in the United States. Since the strain of influenza that is active (H1N1) is novel, no one knows accurately what will happen next. However, the CDC is warning that one option is a second spike of flu activity, which is what occured in 1957 when another novel strain of influenza spread in the United States.

Google has been chatting with public health officials about new ways that they can help people understand the spread of flu during this unusual time and today they are excited to bring city level flu estimates to 121 cities in the United States.

By tracking the reputation of certain Google search queries, Google was able to estimate the level of flu in near real-time. Google Flu Trends is updated daily and may offer early detection of flu activity, since traditional flu surveillance systems often take days or weeks to collect and release data. These city level estimates are "experimental," meaning they haven't been validated against official data. However, the estimates are made in a comparable manner to our U.S. national estimates, which have been validated. Check out our YouTube video for an immediate introduction to this system.

Google is pleased to be announcing this addition to Google Flu Trends during National Influenza Vaccination Week. If you're searching for a flu vaccine location near you, please visit the flu shot finder.

Over the next few weeks, Google is rolling out the capability to upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online. Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is bigger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to backup large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud. More significantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more suitable option for accessing your files on different computers.

This feature can also assist you work with teams to organize and collaborate on information online. For example, a designer can share large schematic files with her construction firm, while a P.T.A. member can share large graphic files for posters with other members. You can still add these files to the same shared project folder your team has previously been using to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.

In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to effortlessly upload many files at once and sync them with their desktop in real time using third party applications. You can read more about how the capability to upload any file will help businesses on the Google Enterprise blog.

This feature will be enabled for your account over the next couple of week look for the bubble notice when you sign in to Google Docs. For more information, check out the post on the Google Docs blog.

Google is excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io. Google’s third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. Google expects thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

I/O 2010 will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will attribute the most recent on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs and more. Members of Google’s engineering teams and other web development experts will lead more than 80 technical sessions. Google also will bring back the Developer Sandbox, which they introduced at I/O 2009, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.

Google will be regularly adding more sessions, speakers and companies on the event website, and Google is today happy to give you a preview of what's to come. Over half of all sessions are already listed, covering a range of products and technologies, as well as speaker bios. Google also included a short list of companies that will be participating in the Developer Sandbox.

Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $100 (this discounted rate is limited and obtainable on a first come, first serve basis).

Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so Google encourages you to sign up in advance.

Typing "Christianity is" or "Buddhism is" into the search engine's home page generates a series of offensive suggestions for how the user might wish to complete their query. These include "not a religion", "a cult", "fake" and "bullshit". Few of the suggested searches are positive or neutral.

But attempting a related search for Islam produces no suggested results whatsoever, indicating that Google may be affording a security to Muslims that it does not extend to people of other faiths.

Google Suggest, which is normally considered a useful timesaver, generates its recommendations by analyzing the phrases most regularly entered by other users, as well as the websites it indexes and adverts it has sold.

It aims to filter out "pornographic terms, unclean words, and hate and violence terms", and Google retains the power to censor particular suggestions if they receive complaints.

Google has denied protecting Islam from criticism, claiming that the lack of "Islam is" suggested searches is the result of a software problem that will shortly be corrected.

“This is a bug and we’re functioning to fix it as quickly as we can," a spokesman told Wired.com. Entering other search terms involving Islam appears to support Google's claim. "Islam must" generates the suggested searches "die", "be stopped", "be destroyed", "end" and "go".

Last month, Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated at the Computer History Museum the capability to search by using your location as the query. Now, you can try this yourself by going to Google.com in your iPhone or Android browser and clicking on "Near me now" once your location has been provided by your phone.

"Near me now" was intended to address two user problems. First, Google wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you're standing right in front of a business or if it's just a short walk away. For example, you may want to know what other clients think about a restaurant before you go inside (see quick video below) or what they have been raving about on the menu before you order. By selecting the "Explore right here" option, you can find out more about a place "right here" with not many clicks.

Second, Google wanted to make searching for popular categories of nearby places really simple. Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to take a coffee, but you don't see a coffee shop around you. You can merely search for all nearby coffee shops by using "Near me now". To search other categories of places not shown, "Browse more categories" provides access to our local search product with more groups of choices.

"Near me now" is at present available in the US for iPhone (OS 3.x) or Android-powered devices with version 2.0.1 or later. You must first allow location in order for "Near me now" to appear, and "Explore right here" works only if the phone provides location accuracy within approximately a city block.

Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, Google is now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service that Google launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so Google will continue to experiment with the format. But so far Google has found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites.

In December Google further added more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets news wires and TV and radio broadcasters, bringing the total number of news sources discoverable in Fast Flip to more than 90. Encouraged by the positive feedback Google received from users and partners, it decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the U.S. English version of Google News.

Collaboration is a significant part of translation. Whether you work with editors to translate documents, customers to elucidate terms or project managers to meet deadlines, working with other translators is a solution to making high-quality translations. Today, Google is making it easier to collaborate on translations with the release of chat in Translator Toolkit.

Just like chat in Gmail, you can send instantaneous messages to colleagues, friends, family and groups directly from within Translator Toolkit. All the features and settings of chat are similar as what you're used to, including going on the record to save your translation chats in Gmail. If you don’t want to be interrupted as you work on a translation, you can merely go invisible or turn off chat through the Translator Toolkit settings.

In addition to chat, Google has made a few other updates that should make your translation work speedier. You can now modify your display language and set the toolkit tabs to open or close by default. And Google has expanded the entries in the dictionary tab, including useful information like parts of speech and alternate definitions. For example, if you're translating the word cancer into Chinese, you will find alternate translations for cancer as a disease and cancer as a quickly-spreading danger so you can discover just the right word for your translation:

Check out these improvements now in Translator Toolkit.

Last year Google celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. When people visited Berlin last November to participate in a conference entitled Breaking Borders, politicians, policy makers, netizens and journalists all agreed on the importance of freedom of expression for a functioning democracy. The web is providing once unbelievable possibilities for political participation, free exchange of information and democratic movements around the world.

As part of the Berlin conference, Google has announced a plan to work with an NGO called Global Voices and with Thomson Reuters to establish the Breaking Borders Awards.

The awards will tribute outstanding web projects by individuals or groups who have shown courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression, making us aware of diverse political viewpoints and standing up to those who censor information. The winners will be those who are making a real distinction. Google is delighted to share further details about the awards and invite nominations.

Closing date for submissions is February 15. Details on how to apply and the opportunities to join the award team can be found on the website.

Android was developed with one simple idea: Open up mobile devices to facilitate greater innovation that will benefit users everywhere.

Google first executed on this vision a little over a year ago, when it launched Android on one device with one operator in one country. Today, Google has 20 devices with 59 operators in 48 countries and 19 languages. And because Android is free and open source, it continues to flourish. Android allows devices to be built faster, and at lower cost. And anyone can build anything on top of the platform. This ultimately benefits users.

To help adapt Android to the needs of consumers, Google has applied the engineering resources to selected projects with handset makers and operators. Together they have improved the rate and pace of innovation in mobile phones. The volume and variety of Android devices today has exceeded even the most optimistic expectations.

Google is pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. Google also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.

The first phone that the Google will be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One — a convergence point for mobile technology, apps and the Internet. Nexus One is an example of what's possible on mobile devices through Android — when cool apps meet a fast, bright and connected computer that fits in your pocket. The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call "superphones." It's the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store.

Now, the web store allows you to purchase the Nexus One without operator service or with service from T-Mobile USA. Google expects to add more operators, more devices and more countries in the future, including Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and Vodafone in Europe. To learn more about the Nexus One, and Google’s new web store, visit www.google.com/phone.

What can't Google do? The search engine's benevolent arm, Google.org, has developed free home energy monitors, an ocean-exploration tool and now software to monitor the world's deforestation.

Google.org's software analyzes a decades-worth of satellite images to calculate how tree cover has changed over a period of time. "We hope this technology will facilitate stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests, " Google.org said on its blog, adding:

Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are better than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

The software, unveiled last month at the climate meeting in Copenhagen, aims to assist the United Nation's REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) program.

Google.org worked with Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon to develop the software, presently used only by a few partners for testing.

"It's not yet accessible to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year," Google.org said. It will be provided as a not-for-profit service.

Google has a surprising animated logo to celebrate the birthday of one of the world's greatest scientists, Sir Isaac Newton, who was born on Christmas day in 1642 under the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, and still in use in Britain.

Sir Isaac Newton's birthday is being celebrated by a "Google doodle" that shows an apple falling from a tree: an event that inspired him to formulate his theory of gravity, and recognized him as one of the world's greatest scientists.

Google often commemorates events by changing the logo on its search page. Newton's doodle is strange in being the first to include an action – a falling apple – and in having a photographic quality.

Google Chrome has enthused to the number three position on the list of the most used Internet browsers in the world despite its short time in the cyber community. Introduced to the masses in September of 2008, Google Chrome has received warm greetings from internet users around the globe making it the number three browser after a 0.7 percent raise in December.

With only 16 months on the market, it has managed to exceed Safari and Opera according to reports from computerworld.com. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still on top of the list for most-used browsers even though its usage percentage rate has dropped in the past year. Mozilla’s Firefox had a small turn down in usage but is still holding strong in the number two position.

Apple’s Safari dropped from the number three spot to the fourth which gave Chrome its possibility to move up. Google offered portions of the code for their new browser in a report named Chromium in late 2008. The information was released and permitted for portions to be sampled legally which made it easier for computer programmers to design versions to be used on Macs and Linux.

Chromium is almost the same to Chrome but is lacking the Google labeling. Chrome was constructed with an assortment of computer codes drawn from 25 code libraries and was assembled with consultation from third party Netscape.