Google News Updates

Yahoo has joined with Twitter to make its search engine results more "real-time" in an agreement which sees the microblogging service become integrated across its complete product suite.

The partnership is alike to earlier deals Twitter has signed with Google and Microsoft's Bing.

Yahoo's search engine has previously started indexing tweets in a bid to make its service offer faster and more appropriate results - a move made by Google at the end of last year.

However, what is dissimilar to the previous deals is that Yahoo has effectively made itself a Twitter client, as Yahoo users will be able to tweet from multiple platforms across Yahoo's products.

It is unidentified how this will be carried out at this stage. There is an opportunity it could happen via widgets.

The partnership also allows Yahoo users to access their Twitter feed via the company's email service, its homepage and via its satisfied verticals - such as Yahoo Finance.

Google had lastly integrated MySpace updates from public pages into its real-time search feature, which was launched back in December at the Google Search Event in Mountain View, California. Google had initially announced that public updates from both MySpace and Facebook would be integrated into the service. Though up until now, Facebook was nowhere to be seen.

With that said, Google had announced in a tweet [pictured above] that status updates from public Facebook Pages are now part of real-time search results. Most Facebook Pages are for celebrities, events, brands, politicians, etc. and there are only about 3 million of them. That means that Google will not be utilizing public updates from the more than 400 million Facebook users.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Facebook is not charging either Google or Bing for using the position updates from its Facebook users and pages, unlike Twitter, which supposedly is making a little cash from partnerships with all the major search engines.

An example of a screenshot of the updates from Facebook Pages on Google Real-Time Search results below.

Google has announced the “next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers” with its upgrades to the Double-click online advertising system, known merely as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

In essence the upgrade combines the existing DoubleClick display advertising model with enhanced Google-optimised algorithms and analytics which will maximise DoubleClick ad performance online and allow users to track the development of adverts more easily.
To put it basically, the search engine has finally come around to properly integrating DoubleClick into the Google family. Since Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, the service has remained basically unchanged – a bolt-on to the seemingly inexhaustible list of Google products; now DoubleClick has been “Googlefied” to mesh the product into the Google brand.

The new features of DFP comprise a brand new interface which has been changed to make it more intuitive, user-friendly and to reduce errors. Customers will have contact to more detailed reporting and analytics as well as future forecasting to measure the efficiency of current online advertising campaigns and to make the most of future campaigns.

Google has upgraded the DoubleClick algorithm to optimise ad performance and application as well as making opening up the API which will permit developers to add their own apps and modifications to the system.

The DFP will come in two separate packages, one for large online publishers and social media networks, and one for increasing publishers and small businesses. The version for small businesses will be free to download, the full DFP will have to be paid for by the superior publishers.

Google Docs is the web-based tool that has become the organizational center of the classrooms. No longer there is lost assignment problems with development of Google Docs.

Docs also teaches directorial skills. Students form folders to keep up with assignments. The most significant folder is the folder students share with the teacher. All graded writing goes into this folder, and it serves as a characters portfolio for the semester. You do not have to hunt student work; it is organized in a student folder. At the end of the day, you can leave with just a laptop, no papers to lug around.

Each student folder is in a group class folder. The class folder contains each student's writing for the semester:

Each student's online writing portfolio folder is also mutual with his or her parents. Parents can even remark on student work and participate in the revision and editing process.

For students, Google Docs is a priceless tool in the writing process. Students do not need a flash drive to bring drafts to and from home. Also, students can share inscription with peer editors. After peer restriction, students move their final draft into their English 9 folder. As the final editor, you can leave comments to assist the student in revising his or her final draft. It is satisfying to browse through the revision history and see that a student is considering each comment as they revise: Yea! They are actually reading what I wrote! Usually, students do not read teacher comments that are hand written on paper, but it seems to work in Google Docs.

Google Voice is about giving you more power over your communications, through dozens of features ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the facility to send and receive SMS by email.

Users love the Google’s growing list of features, and they are conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.

So Google has created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do.

In addition, Google has created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

1) Voicemail transcription
2) One number
3) Personalized greetings
4) International calling
5) SMS to email
6) Share voicemails
7) Block callers
8) Screen callers
9) Mobile app
10) Conference calls

The videos show the reasons for the invention of the feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, Google has just launched the own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget that Google has built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.

Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't comprehend, a waiter with annoyance tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no suggestion whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, ultimately you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language.

Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress Google demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in a very early stage, this is a demo given by Google to shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to the translation technologies. For more information and to watch the demo, check out the brand-new Google Translate blog.

Google has launched a couple of improvements to the way saving works in all of Google Docs. Now it's much simpler to tell, at a glance, when documents need to be saved, when documents are busy saving, and when documents have been saved into the cloud:

A clickable save button means your document has edits which haven't been saved so far and the timestamp lets you know when it was last saved. You can either wait for autosave to kick in after a few seconds, or you can yourself save at any time using the keyboard (ctrl S on PC, cmd S on Macs), save button, or by going to through the file menu.

A disabled button reading “Saving” means your document is at present being saved, and should complete in a second or two.

A disabled button reading “Saved” means that all data in this document is now saved, and the timestamp tells you when the last change happened. You can securely exit the application or continue editing the document.

These changes are now available in presentations and documents and will be coming to spreadsheets soon.

When you need an answer to a very precise question, sometimes the information just isn't online in one straightforward place. For example, let's say you want to know if there's snow on Skyline Boulevard on a given day or the finest time of year to plant beans in the Bay Area. You might find weather reports and planting guides on numerous different sites, but for these kinds of questions, a person with the right proficiency can be a lot more useful than a webpage.

Google is excited to announce that they have acquired Aardvark, a unique technology company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts. Aardvark analyzes questions to determine what they're about and then matches each question to people with pertinent knowledge and interests to give you an answer quickly.

Google is very impressed with the Aardvark team and the technology they've worked hard to build, and they are looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it. You can learn more about Aardvark's underlying knowledge and premise by reading this paper recently co-authored by founder Damon Horowitz.

In the meantime, Aardvark is accessible today in Google Labs, so try it out.

As thousands of Mac fans and developers gather in San Francisco for this week's Macworld conference, Google is particularly delighted to announce a new beta release of Chrome for Mac. The release includes some of the Google’s most requested features from the Mac community, including extensions and bookmark sync.

You can read more about these features on the Google Chrome blog, or you can try it out straight by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. If you're already using Chrome, you should be mechanically updated to the new beta within the next day.

Variety of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But some of you want a more restricted experience. That's why Google has announced Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains realistic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in Google’s ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site.

It's easy to choose in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your option on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.

And remember, ALL content must still comply with Google’s Community Guidelines. Safety Mode isn't fool proof, but it provides a greater degree of control over your YouTube knowledge. Safety Mode is continuing out to all users throughout the day, watch for the new link at the bottom of any YouTube page.

Google Buzz is a latest way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out a completely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by mechanically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. Google has focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share openly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates firmly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

Google is rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don't see it in your account yet, check back soon. They have also planned to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.

On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a diminutive screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add a significant component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with physical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint a tremendously rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more information about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.

Google is making Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. And building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API and you can join on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.

If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com.

Google already runs a flourishing online translator, Google Translate, but they’ve got far-loftier ideas than merely converting the written word. They want to decode languages spoken over the phone, according to their head of translation services.

Presently, Google’s text translation service covers 52 languages, together with the addition of Haitian Creole last week. Google has developed its text translation examine by crawling and comparing millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. It then uses this translation data to offer text and website translation to users of this translation service.

On the mobile side of its business, Google has released a voice search scheme for Android’s 2.x version. Users can speak into a handset mic and Google’s voice search system will identify the spoken words and perform a search. For the live voice translation service which Google’s Franz Och is developing, this voice search method and Google’s text translation service would be combined to instantly translate spoken voice.

As of yet, no dates or technical details have been revealed about the coming of Google’s live voice translation service. This technology would be a greeting addition to Android or any mobile phone service, as our continually globalizing economy may yield a larger need for voice translation.

As hinted by CEO Eric Schmidt, Google launched a Super Bowl ad Sunday. The ad tells the story of a romance as helped by a series of Google searches which begin with a (presumably) young man looking for leads how to study abroad in Paris and ending with instructions on how to assemble a crib.

John Battelle more or less ran down Google’s intentions Saturday after Schmidt tipped his hand on Twitter. But it was an unanticipated move by the search giant which has eschewed advertising even as competitors Microsoft and Yahoo have spent 10s of millions of dollars to compete with the company that retains a search market share that exceeds 70 percent.

Google has reinvented online advertising but has done no brand advertising itself. Google’s goal was simply to make a series of short online videos about their products and their users, and how they interact. But they liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that so they decided to share it with a wider audience.

Google has announced their third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created have helped to celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh's birthday to Valentine's Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the chance to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.

In adding to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about approaching the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life.

For more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle "A New Beginning" to communicate her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."

Google has also assembled a panel of well-known "Expert Jurors," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. The Expert Jurors will help to narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, Google will also be partnering with the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, Google has planned out to give eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.

Visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be definite that your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

Google made a small advancement to its Google Voice service this week, and will now allow users to send text messages to multiple recipients.

Formerly, you had to copy and paste your message into a new form for every text, but now you can just enter the names or phone numbers separated by commas and send it all at once. To prevent spam, however, there is a maximum of five recipients per message.

Replies from each recipient will be threaded into separate conversations, so you can keep trail of them in your Google Voice inbox.

The attribute is also available via the Google Chrome extension and will soon be added to the mobile app.

A couple of months back, google launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.

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”