Google Earth With an Ocean

Whats New! in Earth 5.0 (beta)

See global changes with decades of historic imagery

If you've ever wondered how your neighborhood has changed throughout time, Google Earth now gives you access to the past. With a simple click, check out suburban sprawl, melting ice caps, coastal erosion, and more.

Dive beneath the surface of the ocean

In the new ocean layer, you can plunge all the way to the floor of the sea, view exclusive content from partners like BBC and National Geographic, and explore 3D shipwrecks like the Titanic.

Track and share your paths with others

Take placemarks a step further and record a free-form tour in Google Earth. Simply turn on the touring feature, press record, and see the world. You can even add a soundtrack or narration to personalize the journey.

Go back in time with historical imagery

• View your neighborhood, home town, and other familiar places and see how they've changed over time
• See the impact of recent trends like suburban sprawl or global warming
• Set the length of time and exact location that you want to see

Explore the ocean with Google Earth

• Dive beneath the surface and visit the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench
• Explore the ocean with top marine experts, including National Geographic
• Learn about ocean observations, climate change, and endangered species
• Discover new places including surf, dive, and travel hotspots and shipwrecks

Record your trip from point A to point Z

• Capture your navigation through Google Earth in real-time, without using placemarks
• Narrate your virtual journey and share it with friends
• Save tours and trips so you can reuse and revisit them in the future

Download Google Earth 5.0

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Doodle 4 Google

Doodle 4 Google is a competition open to school kids, giving them an opportunity to design a Google logo. The theme for the competition is "What I wish for the World."

So I did my own crude Google doodle in Photoshop expressing what I wish for the world!

What I wish for the world is some kind of radical population control as we're a disease killing our host (what happens to a disease when the host dies?). So I have a ban on fertile sperm, the pill and a condom pictured in my Google logo.

Kids, don't be influenced by my Google doodle as it's crude on a few levels and people don't like being told to stop breeding, so you wouldn't win the competition.

Schools and students can find more information on the doodle for Google competition here.

From last year's contest

Registration closes at 11:59:59 PM Pacific time on March 17, 2009 and entries are due by 11:59:59 PM Pacific time on March 31, 2009. Teachers, you'll find everything you need to get started on the Registration page. Only teachers or school employees should register. Parents or students who are interested should contact their teacher to register them.

Register your school

Only teachers and schools can register.
Student or parent? Start doodling now.

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New in Gmail - Labels, Move To, Stickers, PDF Previews

From Google's Blog

Labels: auto-complete and "move to"

The buttons and menus at the top of your inbox look a bit different: there's a new "Labels" button that makes labeling messages even easier. Turn on keyboard shortcuts and hit "L" to bring up your labels, and auto-complete will take it from there. Use the "Move to" button to label and archive in just one step -- just like you would with a folder. Learn more

Gmail stickers

Send in a self-addressed stamped envelope, get back some free Gmail stickers. We may be all about speedy electronic communication, but this time we're going old school with snail mail. Send in your envelope, postmarked by February 14th, 2009, to: Send me some Gmail stickers already, P.O. Box 391420, Mountain View, CA 94039-1420 Learn more

Fast PDF previews

Now you can preview PDFs right in your browser without waiting for them to download and open in another application. Just click the "View" link next to any .pdf attachments you receive.

New in Labs: Tasks

Keep track of what you need to do with a lightweight task list right inside of Gmail. Just click and type to add new tasks, convert emails into tasks, and (most satisfyingly) check them off as you're done. Once you turn on this Labs feature, look for the Tasks link to the left of your inbox under Contacts. Turn on tasks and more from the Labs tab under Settings. Learn more

New in Labs: Text Messaging in Chat

Send SMS text messages right from Gmail. You chat from your comfy computer and reach your friends on the go; they get your messages as texts and can peck out replies on their little keyboards. Turn on SMS text messaging and more from the Labs tab under Settings. Learn more

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Gmail now available in Offline - Gmail Labs

Web-based email is great because you can check it from any computer, but there's one little catch: it's inherently limited by your internet connection. From public WiFi to smartphones equipped with 3G, from mobile broadband cards to fledgling in-flight wireless on airplanes, Internet access is becoming more and more ubiquitous -- but there are still times when you can't access your webmail because of an unreliable or unavailable connection.

Today we're starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you're offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you're used to.

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you're used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you're "borrowing" your neighbor's wireless), you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you're using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.



Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don't be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven't been completely ironed out yet. We've been using offline Gmail internally at Google for quite a while (I've read thousands of messages and answered hundreds en route to visit my son and my daughter). And it's saved me more than once when my home network connection ran into issues (we have squirrels at home that love to chew through outside cable wires). Now we're ready to have a larger set of people try it out, so we're making it available in Gmail Labs for those of you who want to test out Gmail's latest and greatest and send us your feedback.

We're making offline Gmail available to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK English over the next couple of days, so if you don't see it under the Labs tab yet, it should be there soon. Once you see it, just follow these steps to get started:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline^0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

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Google: Every Site May Harm Your Computer

For a short while today, Google classified all results as harmful, several people reported. Basically no matter which URL you saw in the search results... they all had the text “This site may harm your computer” printed above the snippet. Clicking on the result in Google would yield the advisory page usually reserved for malware-infested websites only. The interstitial reads:

<<Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Suggestions:

• Return to the previous page and pick another result.
• Try another search to find what you’re looking for.

Or you can continue to [URL] at your own risk>>

According to Google, this bug lasted around 40 minutes for any particular user (within a time frame of 55 minutes) before it was fixed. Google by now blogged about it, saying:

<

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ’/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ’/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.>>

The StopBadware blog says that the glitch “led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information.” For the future, Google say they will put up “more robust file checks” to prevent such things in the future.

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From Google - 1/31/2009 09:02:00 AM

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

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