Sunday, February 27, 2011


More features from gmail labels

Stanley Chen, Software Engineer say's

Many Gmail power users have elaborate label systems to help organize their mail -- some help file and retrieve mail, others help manage their attention. 

We created the "Hide read labels" and "Hide Labels from Subjects" labs to help people manage their ever-growing lists of labels. Given the popularity and usefulness of these labs, we've decided to graduate them into fully-fledged features. We've also made a few improvements to how they work. First, instead of simply hiding all labels from subject lines, you can now choose which labels to show or hide. We also spiffed up and organized the Labels tab in Settings as well as the dropdown menus for each label in the label list.


If you had enabled either Labs feature, your settings should automatically be carried over. If there was a glitch in the matrix, or if you want to change the visibility for a bunch of labels quickly, you can adjust them en masse by going to the Labels tab in Settings.

Sunday, February 20, 2011


Google Docs is now more powerful!

The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn't clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files.

Today we're excited to launch support for 12 new file types:

  • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
  • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
  • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
  • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
  • TrueType (.TTF)
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
Not only does this round out support for the major Microsoft Office file types (we now support DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS and XLSX), but it also adds quick viewing capabilities for many of the most popular and highly-requested document and image types.

In Gmail, these types of attachments will now show a "View" link, and clicking on this link will bring up the Google Docs Viewer.



You can also upload and share these files in Google Docs, so that anyone can view the content using their browser.

And as always, the Google Docs Viewer is available for use on any website, with both a full Chrome and embedded option. More information can be found here.

source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/12-new-file-formats-in-google-docs.html

Monday, February 14, 2011


Al Jazeera on Google TV

original post by Daniels Lee, Developer Relations

Best of Google TV Series

Over the past two weeks, Al Jazeera has carried 24/7 breaking news coverage of the protests in Egypt. Live video of the protests from Tahrir Square, streaming from AlJazeera.net and English.AlJazeera.net, have driven a 2500% traffic increase to their website. The majority of this traffic has come from the United States, as U.S. viewers can't access Al Jazeera's broadcast on television.

This week, Al Jazeera released their Al Jazeera spotlight site where you can watch breaking news clips, scan headline news and dive into the breadth of their web content -- all on the big screen.

For the latest coverage on the protests in Egypt you can also visit Al Jazeera's YouTube channels in both Arabic and English for premium coverage and CitizenTube for on-the-ground citizen reports.

see also:
http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/02/al-jazeera-on-google-tv.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

Saturday, February 12, 2011


Safe GMail again!

Has anyone you know ever lost control of an email account and inadvertently sent spam—or worse—to their friends and family? There are plenty of examples (like the classic "Mugged in London" scam) that demonstrate why it's important to take steps to help secure your activities online. Your Gmail account, your photos, your private documents—if you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password is conned out of you directly through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely-held information.

Most of us are used to entrusting our information to a password, but we know that some of you are looking for something stronger. As we announced to our Google Apps customers a few months ago, we've developed an advanced opt-in security feature called 2-step verification that makes your Google Account significantly more secure by helping to verify that you're the real owner of your account. Now it's time to offer the same advanced protection to all of our users.

2-step verification requires two independent factors for authentication, much like you might see on your banking website: your password, plus a code obtained using your phone. Over the next few days, you'll see a new link on your Account Settings page that looks like this:


Take your time to carefully set up 2-step verification—we expect it may take up to 15 minutes to enroll. A user-friendly set-up wizard will guide you through the process, including setting up a backup phone and creating backup codes in case you lose access to your primary phone. Once you enable 2-step verification, you'll see an extra page that prompts you for a code when you sign in to your account. After entering your password, Google will call you with the code, send you an SMS message or give you the choice to generate the code for yourself using a mobile application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. The choice is up to you. When you enter this code after correctly submitting your password we'll have a pretty good idea that the person signing in is actually you.


It's an extra step, but it's one that significantly improves the security of your Google Account because it requires the powerful combination of both something you know—your username and password—and something that only you should have—your phone. A hacker would need access to both of these factors to gain access to your account. If you like, you can always choose a "Remember verification for this computer for 30 days" option, and you won't need to re-enter a code for another 30 days. You can also set up one-time application-specific passwords to sign in to your account from non-browser based applications that are designed to only ask for a password, and cannot prompt for the code.

To learn more about 2-step verification and get started, visit our Help Center. And for more about staying safe online, see our ongoing security blog series or visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/. Be safe!

source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

Tuesday, February 8, 2011


Priority Inbox now available in Mobiles

If you've ever cursed a phone's tiny screen as utterly inadequate for sifting through an overflowing inbox you'll be pleased to hear that the Gmail mobile web app now supports Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox helps combat information overload by automatically identifying your important messages so you can focus on those first. Until today it was only available on the desktop and Android devices.

Now, once you set up Priority Inbox in the desktop version of Gmail, you'll see Priority Inbox sections when you visit gmail.com from your phone's browser and click on the 'Menu' screen. You'll also see importance markers in your inbox, so you can quickly identify which messages are important.


This feature is available for most mobile browsers that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 1.5+ and iOS 3+. If you have suggestions or want to learn more, visit our Help Center and forum.

Monday, February 7, 2011


Optimizing your site for Google TV is now easier

original post by Steve Hines and Daniels Lee, (Google TV Developer Relations Team),

As the Google TV platform continues to launch across more devices, developers are probably searching for an easy way to bring great content to Google TV users. We're happy to announce that we have an answer.

Google TV enables developers to build powerful websites using the same technologies they already work with. These include HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and Flash. While existing websites can be displayed in Google TV, the user experience isn't always ideal within the context of a living room. We previously provided a guide for optimizing websites for TV, and today we're releasing several templates and a UI library to make it easier for developers to build optimized sites.

We've created two template designs that are focused on delivering video content, but equally suitable for photos or other multimedia. We recognize that some developers prefer using open web technologies, while others prefer Flash. So we've created two separate versions of each template.





All templates are open sourced under the Apache 2 license, so developers can make modifications to these templates and customize them to fit their brand and desired functionality.

One important optimization for browsing websites on TV is ensuring that D-pad navigation works well. The JavaScript-based templates utilizes a new library we've developed for this purpose-- the Google TV Web UI Library. This library has been open sourced as well.

To get started, you can download the template you want and visit our Google TV Web Developer Forum to get help. We look forward to seeing all the great sites developers will build using these templates.

see also:
http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/02/optimizing-your-site-for-tv-is-now.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/two-improvements-to-contact-groups.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/this-week-in-search-242011.html

Friday, February 4, 2011


Blogger for Android! Looks Cool.

Original post by Shaun Seo from blogger blog,

Have you ever wanted to write up a quick blog post on the go? Now there is an easy way to do this on your Android phone! We are excited to announce our first version of the Blogger Android App. Using the app you can easily compose a post, attach a photo that you just took with your phone, and either save it as a local draft for later or immediately publish it to your blog. If you are an Android user, you can start using the Blogger app today by downloading it for free from the Android Market.


Feature highlights
  • Multiple accounts and blogs: You can easily switch between different accounts and blogs that you have author rights to. Simply choose your account and blog and you are all set to go.
  • Write and save/publish: You can write a post, assign labels, and then either save it as a draft or immediately publish it. Saving as draft is handy if you need to wait until you have Internet connectivity.
  • Photos from camera and gallery: If you see something interesting, you can take a photo directly from the app and include it in the blog post. You can also browse your gallery to include the ones you like.
  • Sharing to Blogger from gallery or browser: Blogger is one of the available sharing options. If you come across a photo in the gallery, or a website while browsing, you can share the content to the Blogger app directly from the sharing menu.
  • Share location: You can share your location by activating the location bar and selecting the correct location. This information will be included in your post.
  • View saved/published posts: By switching to the List View, you can view all your drafts and published posts that you wrote using the app. By performing a long-press on a published post you can invoke a menu that includes the option to view your post in a browser.
We hope you enjoy the app. As always, we would love to hear what you think so please feel free to share your thoughts with us through our feedback form. (Note: this app is available only on Android devices but we are working toward supporting other smartphone platforms to allow more of our users to easily post to Blogger on the go.)

Thursday, February 3, 2011


Bing uses Google search results?

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan's recent post: "Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results" and heard Microsoft's response, "We do not copy Google's results." However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I'd like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.



This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn't shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google's top search result appeared at the top of Bing's ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google's search results in Bing's ranking.

We created about 100 "synthetic queries"—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:


To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn't appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the "Suggested Sites" feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google's result page (shown above).


We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:


For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:


And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:


As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:
or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We've invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that's not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.

see also
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-hotpot-now-on-googlecom-and.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/desktop-notifications-for-emails-and.html