Ever more books to read

7/03/2007 01:47:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

As a book lover, I couldn't have been more excited by the advent of electronic books in the early 90s. And with the rise of the Internet, the possibility of being able to discover books online was really exciting.

I work on a project at Google called Google Accessible Search, which helps promote results that are more accessible to visually impaired users. Building on that work is today's release of accessible public domain works through Google Book Search. It's opening up hundreds of thousands of books to people who use adaptive technologies such as speech output, screen readers, and Braille displays.

I'm extremely enthusiastic about many of our efforts at Google, which ultimately have the potential to make the experience of accessing information for visually impaired users just as easy as it is for those with sight. My reading used to be determined by what was available in a form I could read. But today it's a question of using Google effectively so that I can find the right thing to read. Today's Book Search launch is an excellent example of how technology is truly democratizing access to the world's information.

If you have feedback about Google's accessibility services, join our group to share tips on what works well and what could be made better.

All aboard

7/02/2007 01:01:00 PM

Posted by Wesley Chan, Product Manager

We're pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

We're really excited to welcome the GrandCentral team to Google. While we're moving their technology over to Google's network, a limited number of invitations will be available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.

Google and health care

7/02/2007 12:45:00 PM

Posted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager

In a world of 24/7 news cycles, a summer weekend can bring considerable -- and unanticipated -- excitement. Take for example the reaction we've just seen to an item on our new health advertising blog. Frankly, we were surprised by the pickup, but perhaps we shouldn't have been. We've been proponents of corporate blogging for some time, despite the significant communication challenges that obviously arise from having many voices from all parts of our company speak publicly through blog posts. In this case, the blog criticized Michael Moore's new film "Sicko" to suggest how health care companies might use our ad programs when they face controversy. Our internal review of the piece before publication failed to recognize that readers would -- properly, but incorrectly -- impute the criticisms as reflecting Google's official position. We blew it.

In fact, Google does share many of the concerns that Mr. Moore expresses about the cost and availability of health care in America. Indeed, we think these issues are sufficiently important that we invited our employees to attend his film (nearly 1,000 people did so). We believe that it will fall to many entities -- businesses, government, educational institutions, individuals -- to work together to solve the current system's shortcomings. This is one reason we're deploying our technology and our expertise with the hope of improving health system information for everyone who is or will become a patient. Over the last several months, we have been blogging about our thinking in this area. See: November 30, 2006, March 28, May 23, and June 23, 2007.

In the meantime, we have taken steps on our own to address the failures we see in our health care system. In our case, the menu of health care options that we offer our employees includes both direct services (for example, on-site medical and dental professionals in certain locations) as well as a range of preventive care programs. It's one of the ways we're attempting to demonstrate corporate responsibility on a major issue of our time.

1-800-GOOG-411: now with maps

6/29/2007 06:56:00 PM

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager, and Mike LeBeau, Software Engineer

In case you hadn't heard, a few months back we launched 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) in the U.S. It's a free telephone service that lets you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free.

Today, your GOOG-411 experience just got better: during your call to GOOG-411, just say "map it", and you'll get a text message with the details of your search plus a link to a map of your results right on your mobile phone.

Try it out, and add us to your phone book while you're at it. Let us know what you think either by emailing us or by joining our discussion group.

Google Desktop now available for Linux

6/27/2007 09:14:00 PM

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Just a few months after Google Desktop became available for the Mac, I'm happy to tell you it's now available for Linux users too. Google Desktop for Linux makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.

With this launch, Google Desktop is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Try it out now and read more on the Google Desktop Blog.

Ga-Ga for Gadgets

6/27/2007 06:24:00 PM

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer inspection, maybe I don't know very much at all. When it comes to fine wines, for instance, I can't tell the difference between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I'd probably say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don't know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked that recognition right in to the product by developing the Google Gadgets API. Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website. In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers, as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it's great for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of options for their personalized homepage. There have been some really interesting gadgets created, from to-do lists to Zelda, from a pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an entire customer relationship management (CRM) application.

We've been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they'd like to spend more time developing if they could, and we've been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we're happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love -- building great gadgets. You'll find more details on how to apply on Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the Google Gadget Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you all come up with!

New advisory group on health

6/27/2007 09:50:00 AM

Posted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager

Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.

Although we have some talented people here with extensive backgrounds in health policy and technology, this is an especially complex area. We often seek expertise from outside the company, and health is no exception. We have formed an advisory council, made up of healthcare experts from provider organizations, consumer and disease-based groups, physician organizations, research institutions, policy foundations, and other fields. The mission of the Google Health Advisory Council is broadly to help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development. It's a great privilege for us to work with this esteemed group

Google Health Advisory Council
(Institutions or affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.)

Chairman
Dean Ornish, M.D., Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Douglas Bell, M.D., Ph.D., Research Scientist, RAND Health, RAND Corporation

Delos M. Cosgrove, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, The Cleveland Clinic

Molly Coye, M.D., M.P.H., Chief Executive Officer, HealthTech

Dan Crippen, Former Congressional Budget Office Director & Reagan White House Assistant

Linda M. Dillman, Executive Vice President, Risk Management, Benefits and Sustainability, Wal-Mart

John Halamka M.D., M.S., Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center & Harvard Medical School and Chairman, Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)

Bernadine Healy M.D., Former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Health Editor & Columnist, U.S. News & World Report

Bernie Hengesbaugh, Chief Operating Officer, The American Medical Association (AMA)

Douglas E. Henley, M.D., F.A.A.F.P., Executive Vice President, American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)

David Kessler, M.D.,Former FDA Commissioner, Vice Chancellor-Medical Affairs & Dean, School of Medicine, UCSF

John Lumpkin M.D, Senior Vice President, Director of Health Care Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

John Rother, Group Executive Officer of Policy & Strategy, AARP

Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Vice President, Online Services, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.

Greg Simon, J.D., President, FasterCures

Mark D. Smith, M.D., MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer, The California HealthCare Foundation

Paul Tang, M.D., Internist & Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) & Chairman, Board of Directors, American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)

Sharon Terry, M.A., President & Chief Executive Officer, Genetic Alliance

John Tooker, M.D., MBA, F.A.C.P., Executive Vice President & Chief Executive Officer, American College of Physicians (ACP)

Doug Ulman, President, Lance Armstrong Foundation

Robert M. Wachter, M.D., Professor of Medicine, University of California-San Francisco (UCSF); Associate Chairman, UCSF Department of Medicine; Chief of the Medical Service, UCSF Medical Center

Matthew Zachary, Cancer Patient Advocate, Founder & Executive Director, The I'm Too Young for This! Cancer Foundation for Young Adults

Update: Added links to two more bios.

9,000 and counting

6/27/2007 06:01:00 AM

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Channel Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

This month, we passed the 9,000 mark for enterprise buyers of the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini. That's a great beginning, but we want to reach out even farther, which is why we're embarking on a partnership with Ingram Micro, one of the largest global distributors of technology products in the world. Ingram has extensive reseller relationships that can help us deliver the power of search behind the firewall to businesses of all sizes, more efficiently and at a larger scale than we could on our own.

Both the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance are available immediately to qualified Ingram Micro solution providers in the U.S., with plans for a phased rollout in other regions through the end of 2007.

Contact us here to obtain a Google Mini or here for a Google Search Appliance.

Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone

6/26/2007 06:54:00 PM

Posted by Ping Chen and Joel Onofrio, Software Engineers

If you've ever seen a great picture and wondered where it was, wished you could visit that exact spot yourself, or found yourself itching to share a great photo with somebody -- but you were away from a computer, we've got two new features on Picasa Web Albums to help you out. First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation.

Here's how to get started: when you create a new album, just fill in the optional 'Place Taken' field. You can even drag and drop individual photos directly onto a map, and use built-in Google Maps technology to pinpoint exactly where each was shot. For a quick peek at what the results look like, check out our test gallery.

But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices. You already have a couple of pictures stuffed in your wallet, and maybe even a few wallpapers stored on your phone. But what about all those snapshots you can't carry around? With Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup.

Of course, the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan; learn more here.

As you enjoy your summer travels, remember to take plenty of snaps, and share the most beautiful places in the world (and don't forget to use your phone to show off pics from back home!).

More organizing tools

6/26/2007 06:32:00 PM

Posted by Darren Delaye, User Experience Designer

We collaborate using Google Docs & Spreadsheets so often at work that I now have more than 300 online documents. My project teams create shared documents and spreadsheets for everything: taking notes in meetings, planning product launches, analyzing usability studies, and much more. I also share docs with friends at work to plan baseball outings, and my fiancée and I are using a shared spreadsheet to help manage the guest list for our upcoming wedding. In other words, I'm one of many with a desperate need to organize all my online documents. Thankfully, I got the chance to design a new interface for Google Docs & Spreadsheets that includes folders and some convenient ways to quickly manage and access all my documents (and if you're like me, your own collection of online docs and spreadsheets is growing daily).

Now when you sign in, you'll see a new interface that lets you create personal folders for each of your projects, and drag your online documents and spreadsheets into them. On the lefthand side, you'll see a list of all the people you are collaborating with; click on any name to see all the files you're working on with them. To read more about this new interface, head over to the Docs & Spreadsheets blog.

The wedding planning continues -- but at least all the docs I need are now easier to find in a folder. Hope your own organizing is easier now too.