Monday, March 30, 2009


Gmail Notifier : Check your Gmail messages without opening your browser

The Gmail Notifier is an application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser.

The Notifier is in beta. Before you download it, we encourage you to review the system requirements and privacy information.

If you have the Google Talk client installed, you will automatically receive new mail notifications from Google Talk and you do not need to install the Notifier.

Google Notifier for Mac users


Easy access

to your new Gmail messages with a quick preview of the message subject, sender, and snippet.
+

Timely reminder

for your upcoming Google Calendar events, including date, time, event title, and location.
=

Google Notifier for Mac

The Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar, so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser.

The Google Notifier is in beta. Before you download it, we encourage you to review the system requirements and privacy information.

Sunday, March 29, 2009


Google Help Forums

A Google Help Forum is a community of people like you, who enjoy helping each other figure out the best ways to use a product. Click a link below to visit a forum, find answers, ask questions, and share your expertise.

Sunday, March 22, 2009


Google's latest ideas

My preferred sites

http://www.google.com/experimental/shot_siteprefs.jpg

Tell Google the sites that you like and search results from those sites will be shown more often. Your preferred sites will be marked on the results page so you can find them more easily.
  • Add sites you trust, for example Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews or WebMD for medical information
  • Add local sites, for example the Honolulu Star Bulletin if you live in Hawaii
  • Add a favorite blog site, for example TechCrunch for tech news
You must be signed in to your Google Account to participate in this experiment.

SearchWiki with sound
http://www.google.com/experimental/shot_poof.png

Do you like SearchWiki? Do you enjoy having the power to remove results from your search results pages? Now you can do so in style by having a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result.

Recorded by our co-founder Sergey Brin himself, this sound effect is sure to please!

Alternate views for search results



See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google's technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Keyboard shortcuts


Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard shortcuts include:

Key Action
J Selects the next result.
K Selects the previous result.
O Opens the selected result.

Opens the selected result.
/ Puts the cursor in the search box.

Removes the cursor from the search box.


Accessible View



Navigate search results quickly and easily, with just your keyboard. As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

Current keyboard shortcuts include:

Key Action
j or DOWN Selects the next item.
k or UP Selects the previous item.
l or RIGHT Moves to the next category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
h or LEFT Moves to the previous category (results, sponsored links, refinements).

Opens the selected result.
/ Puts the cursor in the search box.
n Moves to the next result, and fetches more results if necessary.
p Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier results if necessary.
= Magnifies current item
- Shrinks current item
A Switches to Accessible Search Results
W Switches to regular Web Search Results

For now, you need to use the Firefox 3 web browser with this experiment. This note will be updated as other browsers are added. Magnification already works with Google Chrome and Apple's Safari.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009


Google Friends Newsletter - February 2009

From Google Friends Newsletter (Feb 26, 2009)

Winter greetings to all of our Google friends. We hope you enjoy this month's update on our products and services.

POWER TIP

Syncing for iPhone, Windows Mobile and SyncML devices

One of the hardest parts about switching phones is getting your address book and calendar to your new device. We're making that process a little easier with the release of a beta version of Google Sync for the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones, as well as a contacts- only version for phones that support SyncML. Google Sync lets you get your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events onto your phone so your address book and calender are always up-to-date. http://m.google.com/sync

------------
NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES

Doodle 4 Google 2009: "What I Wish for the World"

This month we launched our second annual Doodle 4 Google competition where we invite K-12 students to play around with our homepage logo and see what new designs they come up with around the intriguing theme "What I Wish for the World". The National Winner will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice and have their design displayed on Google.com on May 21. We'll also award the winner's school a $25,000 technology grant. The 40 finalists will travel to Google's New York office and have their doodles in an exhibition at the Smithsonian's, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
http://www.google.com/doodle4google

Collaborative Annotations on YouTube

The YouTube team has just completed a major upgrade to to annotations, the interactive commentary you can add to videos. Now you can add annotations to other people's videos (with permission from the video owner, of course). And if you want to let your friends add annotations
to your video, simply view the video and you will see a special URL in the "Video Owner Options" on the right (you can also access this URL from the annotations editor). You can disable the URL at any time, and you can always delete annotations added by others. http://www.youtube.com

Ocean in Google Earth 5.0

We recently launched the next big step forward in 3D geo-browsing. Google Earth 5.0 includes the long-awaited launch of Ocean, which offers a way to drop below the surface and learn about one of the world's greatest natural resources. Other features in the latest version of Google Earth include Historical Imagery, which lets you travel back in time with imagery from years past, and Touring, which lets you create an easily sharable, narrated tour of your destinations. You can also take a tour of the Red Planet by visiting Mars in Google Earth. https://earth.google.com

See where your friends are with Google Latitude

Google Latitude is a new Google Maps for mobile feature, as well as an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with your friends, and vice versa. Use your Google account to sign in, and then easily invite friends from your existing list of contacts, or by entering their email addresses. It's currently available on Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices; we will have support for other handsets soon. http://www.google.com/latitude

-------------
MISCELLANY

Our co-founder Larry Page published the very first edition of Google Friends Newsletter using eGroups in April 1998. Thanks to fans and readers who keep coming back, it's a tradition we're proud to continue. Since then, of course, new resources and tools have come into being, giving us more ways to help interested folks understand how we work and what we do. Our network of corporate blogs is a fast, immediate way to share news as it happens, covering everything from new product launches and features to some of the plain old silliness that transpires in our offices around the world. And we regularly post videos on the Google Channel on YouTube, where you'll find presentations and talks given by Googlers as well as visits from newsmakers. If you're hungry for more of the goings-on at Google, we encourage you to check out some of these additional resources.
http://www.google.com/press/blogs/directory.html
http://www.youtube.com/google

--------------------------------------------------
The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com

--------------------------------------------------
Share Google Friends with a friend through Google Groups (includes subscribe/unsubscribe information).
http://groups.google.com/group/google-friends

--------------------------------------------------
Google Friends archive:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-friends/topics

Google Friends archive prior to May 2005:
http://www.google.com/googlefriends/archive.html

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Monday, March 2, 2009


The Knol - Share what you know

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/_/rsrc/1235699377396/system/knol/images/header/knol-logo-home.png
A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know: knol.google.com


The Knol for Dummies.com contest

Dummies.com is known for simple, concise how-to content. Knol is one of the easiest and most powerful tools for sharing knowledge online. Now we've teamed up to give you the chance to write a how-to article about something you're particularly good at – and just maybe become famous (and even a little bit richer) in the process.

To enter the contest, simply click the button and begin creating your own how-to knol about whatever subject you know best.

Submissions are open through March 23rd, 2009. On May 8th we'll announce five finalists, selected by Dummies.com editors, who'll have their knols featured on Dummies.com. One grand prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000.

If you need help or inspiration, you can browse other submissions, check out these great knols on buttermilk pancakes and backpacking, or take a look at any of the excellent content on Dummies.com. We even created a "How-to" template to get you started.

Check back often to see all the ideas, and good luck writing your own knol. We can't wait to see what everyone comes up with.