New From Google Blogs

Google Italia Blog: Venite a scoprire Roma Antica in 3D

2008-11-12T03:52:00.000-08:00

Ciò che mi ha affascinato di più di questo progetto è la fedeltà e la precisione nella ricostruzione tridimensionale della Roma Imperiale. Grazie a Roma Antica in 3D di Google sarà possibile per chiunque, a Roma come a Calcutta attraverso internet, fare un viaggio nel tempo alla scoperta dell’Urbe così come appariva 1.688 anni fa, al tempo dell’imperatore Costantino.

È una grande emozione poter ammirare con la telecamera virtuale i monumenti, le strade, i palazzi dell’Antica Roma, entrare negli edifici e visualizzarli nei loro minimi dettagli architettonici: dal Colosseo al Ludus Magnus, dal Foro di Cesare all’Arco di Settimio Severo, dalla tribuna Rostra alla Basilica Julia.

Sono 6.700 gli edifici dell’Antica Roma ricostruiti in 3D e visualizzabili attraverso questo progetto: un vero primato. Si tratta di un’esperienza straordinaria che dimostra quanto le nuove tecnologie possano fare per promuovere cultura e diffondere conoscenza.

Roma Antica di Google è un formidabile stimolo per riscoprire la grandezza della civiltà romana che poi e alla base della nostra identità di italiani, di europei e, più in generale, di occidentali. Il patrimonio archeologico, monumentale e artistico dell’Impero Romano si estende in vari continenti, ma nella Capitale (al tempo dei romani era Caput Mundi) trova la sua concentrazione maggiore.

Opere come il Colosseo (una delle sette meraviglie del mondo) hanno saputo sconfiggere la durissima prova del tempo, resistendo nei secoli a saccheggi, invasioni e guerre mondiali, testimoniando con l’immortalità della pietra la grandezza di uno degli imperi più maestosi mai esistiti.

L’idea che oggi, grazie all’evoluzione della realtà virtuale abbinata alla grande capacità di diffusione del Web, si possa viaggiare nel tempo e visitare la città che amministro così com’era nel 320 d.C mi emoziona e mi riempie di orgoglio, avendo ereditato come Sindaco di questa metropoli anche il suo glorioso passato.

L’aver presentato il layer tridimensionale di Roma Antica in 3D nell’aula Giulio Cesare, proprio sotto la sua grande statua di marmo, è stata una scelta vincente, soprattutto per promuovere e far comprendere la grandezza di questa città a livello globale

Scritto da: Gianni Alemanno, Sindaco di Roma
Link - from Google Italia Blog
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An invitation from the mayor of Rome: Come see Ancient Rome in 3D

2008-11-12T03:50:00.000-08:00

As you read this, I am standing beneath a marble statue of Julius Caesar, participating in an event that means a lot to me: the launch of the Ancient Rome 3D layer in Google Earth. Thanks to Google and the Rome Reborn Project, everyone in the world, from Rome itself to Calcutta, can now travel through time and discover Ancient Rome as it was 1,688 years ago when it was ruled by Emperor Constantine.

The project includes more than 6,700 buildings of Ancient Rome rebuilt in 3D — a true record. This accomplishment demonstrates how technology can be helpful in promoting culture and disseminating knowledge. Ancient Rome 3D is a great opportunity to rediscover the importance of Ancient Roman culture, which is at the base of the Italian, European and, more generally, Western identities. The archaeological heritage and the artistic monuments of the Roman Empire have found their way to many continents, but it is in the capital city (known in Roman times as Caput Mundi, which is Latin for "Capital of the World") that we can still find most of it. For example, architectural masterpieces like the Colosseum (considered one of the seven wonders of the world) have managed to withstand the tests of time — resisting sacks, invasions and world wars over the centuries and proving, with the immortality of their stones, the grandness of one of the most majestic empires that has ever existed.

What fascinates me most about this project is the accuracy of the details of the three-dimensional models. It's such a great experience to be able to admire the monuments, streets and buildings of Ancient Rome with a virtual camera that lets you go inside and see all the architectural details. From the Colosseum to the Ludus Magnus, from the Forum Caesar to the Arch of Septimius Severus, from the Rostra to the Basilica Julia, you can get up close to them all. The idea that virtual technologies now let people experience the city that I guide as it appeared in 320 A.D. fills me with pride — a pride that I inherited from Rome's glorious past.

(To find out more about the new layer, visit http://earth.google.com/rome/, watch the video tour below, or check out the Google Lat Long Blog.)

Posted by Gianni Alemanno, Mayor of Rome
Link - from Official Google Blog
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Roman history comes to life in Google Earth

2008-11-12T03:47:00.000-08:00

Were you someone who struggled to stay awake in ancient history class? If so, perhaps this was due to those uninspiring "artist renditions" in your textbook. Reading countless pages that described how a monument, building or city may have appeared at the time can be pretty difficult to imagine.

Well, today we introduced a new approach to learning about ancient history: the ability to go back in time and explore Rome as it existed in 320 AD -- in 3D!

All of this is possible through the new Ancient Rome 3D layer in Google Earth. To activate the layer, simply open the "Gallery" folder in the "Layers" panel and select "Ancient Rome 3D."

The new layer, produced by the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and based on its Rome Reborn model, contains over 6,700 3D buildings and 250 Google Earth placemarks that allow Google Earth users to explore and learn about this fascinating period of history.

This is the first time that we have incorporated an ancient city in Google Earth. Going back in time presented some new challenges, such as how to handle the ancient terrain which was clearly different than modern day. We needed to ensure that modern day imagery, terrain and buildings didn't interfere with the ancient Rome model so we opted for a simple overlay.

This exciting new layer also serves as the inspiration for the Google Ancient Rome 3D Curriculum Competition, a first-ever Google contest geared towards K-12 educators in the US. Whether your lesson plan involves teaching geometry through Roman architecture or re-imagining ancient history with this new visualization tool, there's fame and an awesome prize package waiting for you! The submission deadline is February 9th, so get those creative engines revved up soon!

So go ahead, fly down to the Roman Forum and experience what it may have felt like to stand on the Rostra of Augusta and make a political speech. Or, if you've fantasized about being a gladiator in the Colosseum, go for it. Simply fly there in Google Earth, enter through the ground level door and envision the crowds cheering you on! Take a look at this video to see what adventures await:

Omnes viae Romam ducunt (all roads lead to Rome).

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager, Google Earth
Link - from Google LatLong
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Cool Tool for News Use

2008-11-12T03:36:00.000-08:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Our friends at the Toolbar team recently launched Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer out of beta in 40 languages. To celebrate this occasion and Toolbar's upcoming eighth birthday, we upgraded our Google News Toolbar gadget: You'll now find tabs with different Google News sections embedded directly into the toolbar, so you can read the news as soon as it breaks, browse top news headlines and images, all without having to leave the site you're on:

You can click through the different categories to see the top stories in the U.S., World, Entertainment, and Sci-Tech domains. When you find something you want to read, you can click on an article to open it in a new tab, or click "all news articles" to open the Google News page containing all related items on that particular topic.

To learn more about the different features on this new release of toolbar, visit toolbar.google.com/features.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News Blog: Election results in real-time

2008-11-12T03:35:00.000-08:00

Posted by Robert Leland, Software Engineer

Today, Americans all across the country are voting, and the results will soon be tallied. We'll make sure you can stay abreast of the election returns on the same Google News pages that already bring you current election news. We'll be providing results from the presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial races as they are reported by the Associated Press.

On the front page of Google News, you'll find a Google Map gadget showing real-time popular and electoral vote counts. On the Elections section page, you can see more detailed results. At the top of the right column we have summaries of the presidential race, and the races for majority control in the Senate and House. Beneath the summaries you can select a state in the pull-down menu. For each state we display the breakdown in votes for the presidency, governor (where there is a race), and for each Senate and House seat that's being contested. You can also follow the presidential election, and see a summary of the popular and electoral votes by visiting news.google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered mobile phone.

For more Google election tools, be sure to check out our 2008 Elections page. It features some useful Google Maps, including one which can give you the location of your polling place. So keep up with the results as they're reported, from wherever you are -- and be sure to add your vote to the tally!
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News Blog: Looking back in time for context

2008-11-12T03:34:00.002-08:00

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

News coverage usually focuses on the most recent events, and when we first launched quotes, we did the same. However, past events frequently provide context that helps us better understand the present. With this in mind, we recently extended our quotes coverage back to 2003. Hopefully this new data (our quotes index grew 15x in size!) will help shed light on what people have thought and said over time, and how their views have changed.

As always, to find a person's quotes you can search for their name on Google News, and if we have any quotes from that person, they'll appear in a onebox at the top of the page. Click on the 'more by' link and from there you can simply browse through all our quotes from that person, or filter them to a specific year using the links on the left. Try comparing Alan Greenspan's quotes on the economy from 2004 to those from 2008:

People running for office are some of the most prolific speakers, especially on economic matters. In Quotes makes it easy to compare what McCain and Obama have said about the economy (or, try comparing Palin and Biden.)

Of course, quotes are not restricted to politics--there are also many from sports figures. See what Michael Phelps said about the 2004 and 2008 Olympic games, or what Roger Federer has been saying about Wimbledon.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News Blog: Straight from the horse's mouth

2008-11-12T03:34:00.001-08:00

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager

With Google News, you can read what candidates are saying about a given topic. You can even compare what two of them are saying about the same topic. But it's also important to hear candidates deliver their own message themselves, in their own voice.

Today, we're adding another tool to the Google News suite to enable you to find and access political messages straight from the horse's mouth. Using the Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) technology already available on Labs, you can now search for and watch political videos right from the Google News election page.

Starting today, after reading an article about a topic that matters to you, you can quickly find out what the candidates have to say about it and hear them say it. Just enter the topic you're interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we'll search candidates' YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (all candidates, McCain's campaign, Obama's campaign or the presidential debates). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you're looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video. You can also share a given video with your friends (just click on ), in case they don't want to take your word for it. Keep in mind that speech-to-text technology is not perfect yet, and some transcriptions might contain some errors. But we think this tool will serve as a valuable resource as we count down to Election 2008.

Checking for political consistency (or inconsistency) has never been so simple. And as election day nears, keep checking our election-related projects.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News in Telugu

2008-11-12T03:33:00.001-08:00

Posted by Kiran Gunda, Software Engineer

During this festive season we are excited to welcome the newest member of the Google News family - Google News in Telugu. Like all Google News editions, the Telugu edition gathers news from several Telugu sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections.

We know that the 75 million strong Telugu speaking population wants to stay on top of current affairs and we hope this new edition makes it easier for them do so. The Telugu edition is our fifth Indian edition of Google News; we already have editions in English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.

As we've blogged about in our previous Indian language edition launches, one of the biggest challenges we faced was making sense of the many non-standard font-encodings used by various publications. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of the text because they are not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well established standard for exchange of text today, we strongly encourage news websites to adopt the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard.

If you are a Telugu news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can contact us to request inclusion. In some cases, we were not able to include news sites because of technical reasons having to do with the structure of the URL or proprietary encodings. You can learn much more about making sure your content is surfaced correctly by reading our documentation on Help for Publishers.
Link - from Google News Blog
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And then Google News came to Poland

2008-11-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist, News Online Team

We're thrilled to announce that we've launched Google News in yet another language: Polish! With this launch, Google News is now available in 23 languages and 48 country editions.

In addition to searching and browsing more than 300 news sources from their desktop, 40 million Polish speakers from Poland and around the world will also be able to find News results through an iPhone. These news results will also be blended into standard Google search results. So to quickly get an overview of what's happening in Poland right now, go to http://news.google.pl/

If you're a Polish speaker, you can check out what Przemysław Budkowski wrote about this launch on the Google Poland blog:

Google news w polsce
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News Blog: Say what?

2008-11-12T03:30:00.000-08:00

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

While political consistency (or inconsistency) can be funny, as John Stewart pointed out in a recent episode of the Daily Show, it can also be a serious political matter.

With upcoming elections in the United States and Canada, we've built a tool that you can use to compare what candidates and other political figures are saying about different issues: we call it "In Quotes." As you might know, Google News already extracts quotes from news articles. Even so, it was a pretty tedious process to compare what two people were saying about a particular topic.

As you might have guessed, In Quotes allows you to do just that. You can easily read what, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama have already said about the economy, education or energy (that's just the e's!). There are more people to select from beyond the US presidential candidates, though, and we also have customized lists of people and topics for Canada, the United Kingdom and India. You can scroll through quotes for each topic, or click the "spin" button to see a random quote for the issue. As with our existing quotes feature, the quotes are automatically selected from Google News articles. It's also worth pointing out that we've launched this feature in Google Labs, which means that it's an experimental feature for the moment.

If you dig on political gadgetry (like I do) you should check out Google's other election-related projects, or another cool take on quotations in the news. Happy spinning!
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan

2008-11-12T03:28:00.000-08:00

Posted by Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineer

Over the last few weeks we've presented a number of new language launches for Google News: 9 new editions in Africa, a Turkish edition and a Malayalam language edition in India.

We're proud to present the three newest members of the Google News family: editions for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan. These are all English language editions.

So, what does it mean to launch a new edition of Google News in a country? With these editions, we hope that readers in these countries can now reach the best news destinations on the internet even faster, and help news publishers better connect to news readers. If you are an English language news publisher in Malaysia, Philippines or Pakistan and don't see your site on our editions, please don't hesitate to contact us to request inclusion.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News Blog: Update on United Airlines story

2008-11-12T03:27:00.000-08:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

Aggregators like Google News were today the subject of news – this time pertaining to a 2002 story regarding United Airlines. For those of you who are interested in the nuts and bolts of why this was indexed by Google News, here are the details:

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36PM Pacific, the Google crawler discovered a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link appeared in that section sometime after Googlebot's last crawl at 10:17PM; because the crawler saw this new link appear, it followed it to an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."

The only date found in the context of the article indicated that the article was from September 7, 2008.

The article was indexed and then available through Google News search, but was not shown on our headlines pages.

We removed this story from the Google News index as soon as we were notified that it had been linked to in error.

It has been widely reported that many readers were unable to determine the original date of publication of this article, and our crawling was similarly unable to recognize that the article was old.

UPDATE 9/10/08

Since our last post, some have asked why Google News didn't recognize that an old story relating to United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy was outdated. We thought that a brief chronology would be helpful.

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time (or Sunday, September 7th at 1:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time), the Google crawler detected a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel's website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link had newly appeared in that section since the last time Google News' Googlebot webcrawler had visited the page (nineteen minutes earlier), so the crawler followed the link and found an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." The article failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline, but the Sun-Sentinel page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern).

Because the Sun-Sentinel included a link to the story in its "Popular Stories" section, and provided a date on the article page of September 7, 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story. We removed this story as soon as we were notified that it was posted in error.

While we don't know why the Sun-Sentinel's website included the link in its "Popular Stories" section, our timestamps show that Google News first crawled the UAL story after following the link from the Sun-Sentinel's "Popular Stories" box:

At 10:17:35 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved a copy of the Sun-Sentinel business section page.

As you can see, no UAL story appears at this time.

At 10:36:38 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved an updated copy of the same section. This updated version included a new link in the "Popular Stories: Business" section to a story titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."

At 10:36:57 PM/PDT, our crawler followed the new link and fetched this copy of the UAL story.

At that point, our index was updated to include the article with the date that the story was crawled, and the story became searchable on Google News.

At 10:39:57 PM/PDT, the Sun-Sentinel received its first referral to the UAL story from Google News, with a user clicking on a Google News link to the Sun-Sentinel's UAL story.

The Tribune Co. (owner of the Sun-Sentinel) has confirmed in its September 9, 2008 press release that the first referral from Google News to the article came after the UAL story appeared in the "Popular Stories" section.

We hope that this sheds some light on the situation from our perspective.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time

2008-11-12T03:25:00.000-08:00

Posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager

Today, we announced that we're launching an effort to give Internet users everywhere more tools to discover, explore, and celebrate much more of our journalistic heritage by digitizing archival newspapers and making them available online in partnership with newspaper publishers across the world. Head on over to the Official Google Blog to read more about this new initiative.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Live coverage of the GOP Convention on Google News

2008-11-12T03:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by David Garnick, Product Manager

The Republican National Convention is underway in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Google News is taking you there. Well, maybe not literally there, but as close as we can get you! For the duration of the convention, you can watch live streaming of the activities on a player located on the special Elections section of Google News. (It's also embedded just below this sentence.)

11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="utv35359" height="320" width="400">Live Streaming by Ustream

We're working with Ustream.tv to stream the coverage live at the following times:

Tuesday, September 2: 6:20 - 10:05 p.m. CDT
Wednesday, September 3: 6:20 - 11:20 p.m. CDT
Thursday, September 4: 6:20 - 10:15 p.m. CDT

If you miss some of the speeches, highlights from the convention will be broadcast at other times all week long.

I'm excited that I can watch the convention, alongside ongoing news coverage, from the first balloon to the last confetti.
Link - from Google News Blog
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News without borders: search results across languages

2008-11-12T03:22:00.000-08:00

Posted by Mahesh KM, Software Engineer

One of our most important goals for Google News is to expose readers to a diverse range of journalistic viewpoints. This is why we think it's important to have hundreds, if not thousands of different sources for important stories. It's also why Google News is currently available in more than 20 languages.

We've recently released a feature which we call cross-language search, which will help you find even more perspectives when you search in Google News. Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.

You won't see results in different languages unless they're at least as good as those in your own language. This means it's more likely that you'll see results in other languages if you're using Google News in a country which doesn't have many online news sources. You'd also be more likely to see them if you're in a country in which more than one language is widely used, such as Canada or India. For a language which has lots of sources, like English, it's unlikely that you'll find a foreign-language result when you search normally on Google News -- especially if you're searching from within a monolingual country like the United States or the United Kingdom. However, if you were searching for a breaking story in another country, and sorting your results by date, you might see a foreign-language story from a local news source which has the latest coverage.

Similarly, if you type in a query in a foreign language, we'll know to display results from that language, no matter what version of Google News you're using. For example, if you use the Czech edition and want to see how the new Batman movie is being reviewed, we'll show you results from countries where it's already been released, in English and Czech. Or if you're reading the Spanish edition of Google News and want to learn more about the recent G8 summit, we'll show you results in English as well as Spanish, since 3 of the 8 countries in the G8 are Anglophone, and none are Spanish-speaking.
Link - from Google News Blog
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More African countries now have their own edition of Google News

2008-11-12T03:21:00.000-08:00

Posted by Divon Lan, Product Manager

Google News is a truly international project, spanning dozens of countries and over 20 languages. But that still leaves plenty of countries without their own dedicated edition of Google News.

Today, we are delighted to announce that we've made great progress in our quest to give Google News an even more global reach, by adding 9 more countries to our repertoire. If you head down to the bottom of any Google News page, you'll see new English editions in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

With these 9 new editions, Google News now has a significant presence on every one of the world's inhabited continents: 5 editions in North America; 7 editions in South America and the Caribbean; 19 editions in Europe (including Turkey); 11 editions in Asia, the Middle East and Oceania; and now 10 editions in Africa.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google brings News to its Turkish users

2008-11-12T03:20:00.000-08:00

Posted by Mustafa Icil, Country Marketing Manager, Turkey

Today, we're delighted to announce the launch of Google News in Turkey. Now, Turkish-speaking users in Turkey and around the world are a click away from the latest news in their native language. The Google News Turkish edition crawls articles from more than 400 sources, so that news enthusiasts in Turkey can easily discover and read a wide variety of perspectives on important stories.

We think this is a significant step towards helping our Turkish users find even more content online. We're pleased to note that with this launch, we've made over 40 regional editions of Google News available in 22 different languages.

If you're interested, you can try out the Turkish edition at news.google.com.tr or haberler.google.com.tr.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News goes to the Summer Games

2008-11-12T03:19:00.002-08:00

Posted by Lara Rennie, Software Engineer, Trondheim

We have software engineers from almost every country in the world, so we know as well as anyone how passionate folks can get about their hometown athletes. This year, the Google News team is doing our part by launching a Summer Games section in different news editions so that Games enthusiasts around the world can follow the progress of athletes from New Zealand to Norway, in whatever language they prefer to read their news.

Our Summer Games section highlights the action by bringing together the top articles about the Games. This automated section, currently available in our most popular languages, combs through all the news we can find to show you the most up-to-date headlines from the 2008 Games. The section also includes two gadgets along the right side of the page: one to help you keep tabs on upcoming events and one that displays the all-important medal count.

So on the News team, we're ready for a little friendly international competition. Will the U.S. retain its 2004 distinction as the winner of the most medals? Or will China, with its home advantage, oust the States from this coveted position? One thing we know for sure: our News engineers in Norway will be cheering for Norwegian supremacy no matter what.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)

2008-11-12T03:19:00.001-08:00

Posted by Vinodh Kumar, Kiran Gunda and Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers

வணக்கம். தமிழில் செய்திகள்! (Greetings, News In Tamil!)

It's not every day that you get to launch a product in a more than 2,000-year-old language spoken by more than 70 million people. That's why we're excited to tell you that Google News is now available in Tamil. Tamil is one of the most widely-spoken languages in India, which is no mean feat considering that there are 22 official languages here.

The Google News Tamil edition indexes news from a large number of Tamil sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google News sections, we have seperate local sections for Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, regions that are home to millions of Tamilians. One issue we faced during the launch of the Tamil edition was incorporating news sites that do not use the Unicode based UTF-8 standard. We faced similar issues when we launched our Hindi edition last year. Since then, we are pleased to note that several Hindi news sites have shifted to the Unicode standard (and we encourage all publishers to do the same, so that more people can read your online publication.)

We hope this edition will help Tamil readers reach their online news destinations faster and help Tamil news publishers to connect more easily to their readers.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Testing... testing... is this on?

2008-11-12T03:18:00.001-08:00

Posted by Frank Harris, Senior User Experience Designer

Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism. They'll only be visible to a small number of random Google News readers. (In case you're wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can't give you any advice for how to get in!)

It's pretty normal for us to run this kind of test, as we're always working to improve the experience of using Google News. In fact, experiments like these are a cornerstone of Google's development process - here's a post on the Official Google Blog explaining this practice for our search results.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google launches Gmail audio, video chat

2008-11-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

Google today launched the surprise addition of Gmail video chat to its webmail interface. The feature lets contacts use Google Talk to start a two-way video or audio-only conversation with anyone currently online and can be started in the middle of a text chat. Like dedicated desktop apps, the web version carries a picture-in-picture view and can be stretched out or made full-screen.

The feature is also potentially usable by any other software, Google says: as it uses H.264 video and standard Internet streaming protocols, third-party apps can hook into the Gmail video chat format to use the feature without tying users to a web browser or specific interface.

Using the feature requires a plugin and is currently limited to Macs and Windows PCs, which can download the update today. It should work with any standard webcam recognized by the respective operating system.

The feature signals an increasing move towards live video for Google. While YouTube and nearly all the company's other properties hinge on prerecorded video, the company has begun to use live video for events and with Gmail is now giving users their first live video streaming feature. YouTube has floated the possibility of live video as with services like Qik and Ustream but so far is focusing only on making its existing playback business profitable.

GMail & Video Chat

2008-11-12T01:51:00.001-08:00

Props to Google for the unexpected treat today. Video and audio streaming are now components within Gmail chat.

A nice addition for those who use Gmail as their primary mail & IM client. For me, it solves an irritating problem that I believe to be rather widespread...

We have a significant contingent of MAC users - especially within the web world. Most have built in iSight cameras - so the hardware exists to support video conferencing across the global team. Unfortunately, iChat requires firewall ports be opened up (if memory serves, 16 or so). Of course, getting folks to poke holes through your security takes a tad more than a short form and a nice little note. Windows users are taking advantage of LiveMeeting 07, but video conferencing in the product is limited to the full blown client. Naturally, there's no OS X version.

Alas - no easy solution for us MAC folks... Until today.

I came across the Gmail blog this afternoon, read the news, had what could be described as a small panic attack, installed the plugin and IM'd a pal. Voi la - internal video streaming without any new hardware or software, no new servers, nothing... Better yet, I'll still be getting holiday cards from my friends on the security team...

You've got to love it when someone unexpectedly drops a solution to a longstanding issue in your hands. Oh right, and for free :)

Thanks again, Google.

Google adds voice, video chat to Gmail, Google Apps

2008-11-12T01:41:00.000-08:00

Google Inc. added a voice and video chat feature to Gmail today. The capability allows people who use the free e-mail service to click on a contact's name and talk face-to-face with the contact in a videoconference -- as long as both the user and his contact have computers equipped with webcameras and microphones.

Businesses that have bought an enterprise version of Gmail, found within the Google Apps software package, will also receive the feature at no extra charge.

Google believes that the voice and video features will benefit from the fact that webconferencing has become easier in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of Web-based applications and cameras that have been built into computers as standard features.

"It opens up opportunities that weren't there before," says Rajen Sheth, the senior product manager at Google Enterprise, which oversees Google Apps. "And just from a Web browser, you can initiate this functionality."

Now use Gmail for Voice and Video Chat!

2008-11-12T01:39:00.000-08:00

Couple of hours ago, Gmail has announced its launch of “Gmail Voice and Video Chat” feature using which you can make voice and video calls to your online buddies right from the browser. Ironically, this feature is introduced first on the browser instead of messenger. Since long Gtalk was missing the feature of video calling which is now fulfilled by this brand new addon - Gmail for Voice and Video Chat. Seems, this new innovation is going to bring a stiff competition on the net telephony market, also the launch can be a red alert for Skype too.

To get started, you just need to install this plugin and rest will be taken care of by it. Now you must be wondering how to make voice and video calls right from the browser.. Isn’t it? Well, as highlighted on the image, after installing the plugin, just use the ‘Video & more’ button to get started. To help you understand better, I have also included a video tutorial at the bottom of this article.

As of now, we were unable to test the quality of these chats, but we will update this post once we get a chance to try it out for ourselves.

If you are still confused, just have a look on the video

Links: Video Chat Plugin | Support

Google's Gmail, Apps Gets Voice and Video Chat

2008-11-12T01:37:00.000-08:00

Fearful that the tone of your instant messages is sometimes lost in translation? Google on Tuesday announced that it is integrating a voice and video plug-in for it Gmail Chat offering that lets you see or hear the friend with which you are chatting.

Users will need to download and install a plug-in and must have access to a webcam for video purposes. Google has partnered with Logitech and Buy.com to offer discounts of up to 30 percent on several cameras, as well as free shipping, until November 30.

A $99.99 Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks, for example, is available for $69.99, while a $49 Logitech QuickCam Communicate MP is now $39.99

"I'm a big user of Gmail chat. Being able to switch from email to chat as needed, all within the same app, is really great for productivity," Justin Uberti, a Google software engineer, wrote in a blog post. "But people can only type so fast, and even with our new emoticons, there are still some things that just can't be expressed in a chat message."

Once installed, click the "Video & more" link inside the chat window and select "Start video chat" or "Start voice chat."

The friend you are trying to contact will hear a ring and be given the option to answer or ignore the call. Users can then chat within the Gmail tab or pop it out into a separate window and expand or decrease its size.

Voice and video chat is available on Macs running Mac OS X v10.4 or later and PCs running Windows XP or higher. A link to download the offering will be rolled out to all Gmail and Google Apps accounts in the coming days, but it is also available directly at http://mail.google.com/videochat.

The video function was designed via open standards, "which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat," Uberti wrote.

The offering was developed by Google teams in the U.S. and Sweden "so collaborating across continents and time zones is a fact of life for us, and it sure is easier (and greener) to click 'Start video chat' than to get on a plane!" he said.

Voice and video chat comes to GMail

2008-11-12T01:36:00.001-08:00

The Google team is slowly rolling out a couple of features that, if it works well, will be quite useful - voice and video chat within GMail.

Now, if you log in to your GMail account and hover over the name of a contact, you will see a pull down menu “Video and more”. Upon clicking “Add Video/Voice chat”, you will be prompted to install a new plugin for chats.

You will be led to the chat extension page, from where you can install the required plugin.

Voice and video chat within GMail window certainly would come handy, as it would mean that we longer have to install an instant messenger client for urgent purposes, or when away from home. Could this new feature be the beginning of the end of use of full-fledged IM clients (at least for casual chat users)?

Voice & Video Chat in Gmail, Get it Now !

2008-11-12T01:35:00.001-08:00

We can chat with Gmail friends with integerated chat in Gmail inbox. Hang on, Gmail is making things more interactive with introduction of voice and video chat in Gmail. So, besides typing ‘Hi’ ‘Hello’ - you can speak and see your friend saying ‘Hi’ ‘Hello’ and lots more.

This new feature is all free (as expected from Google) which offer high-quality audio and video and promises to be easy to use. To get started you need to download and install plugin for this new feature. After the install perform:

Login to your Gmail account
Click “Video and more” menu (bottom of Gmail chat window).
Click “Start video chat” & wait till you see / hear your contact.

As explained by Gmail Blog, you can click the “pop-out” icon to make the video larger or click the fullscreen icon in the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience. Checkout the video for all the action:

Don’t see this feature in your Gmail Account?
This feature is being rolled out in a phased manner, you will soon get this feature in your Gmail Account. This gives Gmail all new meaning with ability to interact with voice & video. Wonder what Skype thinks about this?

Gmail Adds Voice and Video Chat

2008-11-12T01:32:00.002-08:00

Gmail is rolling out a new feature today: Voice and Video Chat. The bad news–for me, not you–is that it isn’t showing up for me yet when I log into Gmail. The good news? I happened to be visiting Google when the news broke, so I got an in-person demo. (They say that it’ll be available to all Gmail users by the end of the day.)

The feature looks cool, and it’s exceedingly straightforward. When you’re in Gmail, your contact list will show a little green camera icon next to any buddy who has a Webcam, is online, and has installed the Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in (which works with IE 7, some versions of IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, Chrome). Click the icon, and you get a chat window with video in the botton right-hand corner of the Gmail interface. (You can also blow it up to full-screen mode.)

Here’s Google’s demo:

I haven’t used Gmail for chat much; this is a reason to give it a try…assuming that I can get the folks I’d like to chat with to install Google’s plug-in, that is.

Google adds Video and Voice chat to Gmail

2008-11-12T01:32:00.001-08:00

Starting right now, Google is rolling out voice and video chat to all Gmail users. The audio-video chat feature is fairly simple and works straight from the browser. Unlike Skype and other VOIP services, you can’t make phone calls and scores of other features are missing, but still it’s a great add-on for Gmail.

Google decided to ditch flash, and build their proprietary add-on for the feature. The add-on weighs around 2 MB and supports IE, Firefox, Chrome in PC and Firefox-only for Mac users. Once the video feature is enabled in your account, you’ll see "Video & more." option in the lower left corner of the Gmail chat box. If you are trying to make a video call to someone, who has not installed the add-on, you’ll be able to invite them to do so. You have an option to go full-screen while video chatting.

(click to enlarge)

I’m quite disappointed that Google didn’t consider using the cross-platform Flash plugin. Since most people already have Flash plugin installed, users don’t need to install another browser add-on. Google Talk application has supported voice chat right from its early days. I’d like to see some of these new features added to the downloadable client as well.

Update: I’ve just confirmed that this works with Safari on OSX too, so the Apple people haven’t been left out.

Update: Here’s the announcement from Google

Google Rolls out Gmail Voice and Video Chat…Slowly…

2008-11-12T01:30:00.002-08:00

Google just launched video and voice chat today for both PC and Mac. My first reaction? That is so cool.

The only problem is the announcement went out before they had actually activated many accounts. Including mine. Luckily, I had the email address of the Google contact who sent out the announcement, and he spent some time troubleshooting with me. First order of business? Getting my email account activated as well as that of my initial Gmail voice and video chat guinea pig, Scott from Alaska HDTV (@alaskapodshow on Twitter).

After about an hour, Scott still could not see the video options in his Gmail chat box. While he and I continued to restart browsers and compare notes, I received a text chat message from my friend Kris, a multimedia producer and documentary filmmaker in Brooklyn (@krisbritt on Twitter). She had seen my Tweets about my attempts to test out the new Gmail voice and video chat.

I invited her to video chat and within moments and after just a few rings, the video chat window opened, and there was Kris. The picture was clear, the sound was clear.

Right away I thought “This is much better than Skype.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love Skype, but it can fizzle and pop now and then. WWD blogger Samuel Dean also tested Gmail voice and video chat and points out that it falls short compared to Skype because it doesn’t connect calls to landlines and doesn’t offer voice mail. It does, however, allow you to record a video chat. Ah, the possibilities!

Right away, Kris echoed my feelings that Gmail voice and video chat is convenient and a great addition to the Google suite of tools - perfect, for example, to use while reviewing a Google Doc with someone else. Having video and voice chat within Gmail also means you’ll get more functionality with less open applications and windows.

Some quick things to know before you dash off to download the video chat add-on for your browser:

1. Your account must be activated by Google for video, and this could take a few more days.

2. Your chat friend must have Gmail voice and video chat add-on installed for it to work. Otherwise they will be directed to the download page for the add-on.

3. You can tell if a friend is video-chat enabled by a little video camera icon to the left of their name on the contacts Chat List in your Gmail account.

4. You can invite someone to video chat with the Video Options button at the bottom of the chat box.

5. You can pop out the video into it’s own window and move it around as well as open it to full screen.

One possible software conflict? The latest Flash player may interfere with the proper installation of the video add-on (this is just a guess from Scott who eventually switched computers and was able to video chat immediately).

Troubleshooting tips? Make sure your browser is closed before you install the add-on. Then you may have to restart your browser a few times until it takes. Just something anecdotal. Probably not in the manual.

Have long did it take to get Gmail voice and video chat to work for you? What do you think you’ll use it for?

Gmail Video Chat

2008-11-12T01:30:00.001-08:00

Google say they’re currently rolling out a video chat option to Gmail. I can’t see it yet, but according to Google, once it’s rolled out and you installed the Windows plug-in (and restarted your browser), you’ll see a “Video & more” -> “Start video chat” option at the bottom of your Gmail chat box. Contacts of yours who also installed this plug-in are supposed to show with a camera icon next to their name in the chat list. Once you contact a person, they’ll hear it ringing and can accept the video chat, and you can then see & hear them via the webcam.

Voice and Video Chat in Gmail

2008-11-12T01:29:00.001-08:00

As anticipated in the post about Gmail SMS, video chat is the next big that will be added to Gmail. Justin Uberti says that video chat will be added today, along with voice chat.

"We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video. And we've built this product using Internet standards, such as XMPP, RTP, and the newly-standardized H.264/SVC video codec."

To try the new features go to http://mail.google.com/videochat and install the required plug-in (Windows & Mac-only, for now). After restarting the browser, open Gmail, select a contact from the chat section and see if there's an option named "Video & more". If you can't find this option, your friend didn't install the plug-in yet.

Instead of developing new versions of the Google Talk desktop application, Google decided to focus on its most popular communication channel and add the missing features. Too bad that you need to install yet another plug-in...

Google Enables Video Chat Inside Gmail

2008-11-12T01:28:00.001-08:00

If you find switching from email to chat using Gmail helpful and convenient, you might be even more glad to know that Google has just enabled voice and video on Gmail’s chat facility. Yes, you read it right, Gmail Chat has become a Skype-like service with pseudo-VOIP features. The new video and voice chat facility offers up an easy-to-use, seamless interface characterized by high-quality audio and video. And that goes without saying that it’s a free service.

To start using the voice and video chat feature in Gmail, you just need to download and install a plugin, which takes almost a few minutes by the way. Make sure that you have enabled the chat facility in your Gmail account then do the following:

Login to your Gmail account
Click on “Video and more” menu which is located at the bottom of your Gmail chat window
Click on “Start video chat”
And wait till you see and hear your contact

Additionally, you can make the video screen larger or fullscreen as well. If any of your contact whom you wish to contact via the Gmail voice and video chat facility has not enabled the feature, they will be invited to download and install the plugin. And I don’t see any reason why Gmail Chat users would not want to use this facility. It’s lightweight, sits right on your Gmail and seem to be a pretty stable and robust chat facility.

If Google can fine tune this chat facility some more, Skype ought to be scared.

You may download the video and voice chat plugin here.

Reflections on the Sichuan earthquake

2008-11-12T01:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by Xin Li, Engineering Manager

The devastating earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province at 2:28 pm on May 12. I was so worried: there was no news about what had happened shortly after the earthquake, and even worse, I was unable to reach my parents in my home town there. It was not until 2 hours later that my call to my parents finally got through, to find that, luckily, they were all safe. Despite my own good fortune, I could not help crying even in public for all the friends in my home town, whether known or unknown. The catastrophic impact was far more than the media could describe.

When the earthquake happened, we, as humans, felt ourselves to be so weak and helpless. However, as the rescue and recovery plans started, people found there was so much they wanted to do. The government, rescuers from around the world and indeed the whole nation have joined together to recover from this unpredictable disaster. Many of my colleagues in Google China helped to start several initiatives in response. The reaction to this misfortune has been overwhelmingly loving and positive. So far, the value of aid donated nationally and internationally has exceeded more than 6 billion USD.

As we, the Google News team in Shanghai, witnessed events, we had a strong desire to help keep people informed with in-depth coverage of the unfolding crisis. So we created a special section in the China edition of Google News to cover the earthquake. The section also contains a link near the top of the page which directs readers to a Checkout Donations page where they can make donations to people in need.

News carries the message, passes on stories of adversity and hope, and relieves the hardship. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we think that by spreading news about this tragedy, we can help connect people who care about it.

An aftershock of 5.3 magnitude struck Sichuan today, June 5, 2008. As of today, the China earthquake death toll has risen to over 69,100.

Our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow Sichuanese.
Link - from Google News Blog
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News mapped out on Google Earth

2008-11-12T01:23:00.000-08:00

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

It's part of the vision of Google News to crawl and index every word of every news story, around the world. It’s a lot of information, but we’re working on ways to make this index more specific. For example, our local news feature allows you to view news stories from a particular area. Now, we’re taking this concept and making it visual: the Google Earth and News teams are working together to provide you with a new way to explore current events, via a real-time News layer on Google Earth. When zoomed out, you'll see the top stories from around the globe, tagged on the globe via placemarks. If you're interested in the news about a region, just zoom in and you'll find news stories about that location. We hope this layer provides you with another way to explore and discover news, perhaps about places you didn't even know existed.

To activate the Google News layer, navigate to the "Layers" menu on the left-hand side of Google Earth. Expanding the "Gallery" node in the layers tree will expose the "Google News" layer. Check the box next to the Google News layer and start zooming into the places on the globe in which you're interested. Each story is represented by a Google News icon on the globe. Clicking on the news icon opens up the news story's snippet, along with links to learn more about the event.

Link - from Google News Blog
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Responding to the crisis in Myanmar (Burma)

2008-11-12T01:22:00.000-08:00

Posted by David Garnick, Product Manager

The massively destructive cyclone that struck Myanmar (Burma) has caused an extensive loss of life. However, in the wake of the cyclone, there are new crises facing the population of the country. Getting aid to those in need, stemming the spread of disease, and guarding the safety of orphaned children are among the most urgent needs.

To keep the world informed about these stories as they develop, we've launched a special section, titled Myanmar (Burma). The section is available in the English language editions of Google News in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The lead stories appear on the front pages of these editions. Like other front page sections, you can find deeper coverage on the specific section page.

In addition to providing news coverage of the ongoing crisis, the special section contains a link near the top of the page that will direct you to a Checkout Donations page where you can make donations to UNICEF or Direct Relief International. Now you can help make a difference while you keep yourself informed.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Keeping good news stories together: just part of what it means to work on Google News

2008-11-12T01:20:00.000-08:00

Posted by Lucian Cionca, Software Engineer

Have you noticed that when there are a bunch of articles about the same story, we’ll group them together? I think this is one of the key features of Google News. When you're browsing through Google News and you click on a link to see "all 257 articles" about a story, you can read perspectives from different news sources, or see how a story evolves over time.

We call these groupings of stories “clusters.” So far, we’ve only kept individual news stories together for three days, after which time they’re broken out and presented on their own.

Today, though, we’ve removed the three day limitation, meaning that stories will stay in clusters (and be easier to find) for as long as they're in our index. Since stories in Google News remain indexed for 30 days, you’ll find clusters for any news stories from the past month. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every article is going to appear in a cluster - just that clusters won’t be broken up anymore.

As an example, if you search for [dalai lama paris] in order to read about the decision of the city of Paris to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, you'll get a story for that event along with related events:

In addition to greater perspective on news stories, this feature will also help us display more diverse search results on the first page: less space will be taken up by individual, unclustered articles. I think this brings us a step closer to our goal of making news universally accessible from as many sources, perspectives and languages as the world can offer.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Google News now available on your iPhone and iPod Touch

2008-11-12T00:50:00.000-08:00

Posted by Håvard Kvålen, Robert Leland and Amund Tveit, Software Engineers

As we sat in our offices in Trondheim staring off at the fjord -- we're Norwegians, that's what we do -- a thought occurred to us: wouldn't it be nice to make Google News accessible to readers on their iPod Touch or iPhone? The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we're happy to announce that Google News is now available to iPhone and iPod Touch users in over 30 countries. This means that you'll see a full-fledged version of Google News on these devices, improved Google News results and, where available, relevant YouTube videos embedded with news stories.

There are a few ways to get to Google News using your iPhone or iPod Touch:

Go to www.google.com, click on the "more" tab and follow the link to Google News
Go to www.google.com and do a search, then click on the News link at the top of the screen
Go directly to Google News at http://news.google.com in your browser

We hope you enjoy this new feature. We haven't been able to take our eyes off it yet, not even to look at the fjord!
Link - from Google News Blog
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Words matter

2008-11-12T00:48:00.000-08:00

Posted by Jack Hebert, Akash Nanavati and Natasha Mohanty, Software Engineers

Be it poetry or public speech, words matter.

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.

To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results.

Clicking on the speaker's name will take you to a page with even more of their quotes. From there you can search within the quotes by entering a query on the left side of the page. For example, entering [iraq] in the search box will produce quotes from John McCain that mention Iraq.

For a different viewpoint, try Barack Obama's quotes on Iraq.

Visit our user to user forum to tell us about how you're using the quotes feature.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Need Help? Contact our Support Team!

2008-11-12T00:47:00.000-08:00

Posted by Greta Ghizzo, News Support Team

Last week we launched a new form that will make it easier for users around the world to report an issue with Google News. With the Report an Issue page you’ll be able to send us a quick note to inform us about the problem you’re having with your edition of Google News.

Simply browse the page and look for the specific issue you’d like to report. Then click on the “View Details & Report” and enter the information required. In most cases, you won’t be asked to enter any personal information. Say for instance that you’d like to report a mismatched image in Google News. All you need to do is enter the title of the article associated to that image and the link to our results using our “site:” operator and then click on the “Report it” button. This will ensure that someone on our team will look into the issue and take appropriate actions.

Along with this form we launched an informational page on some of the channels currently available to contact our support team. Keep contacting our team with your suggestions on how we can improve Google News.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Psst...secrets of Google News exposed!

2008-11-12T00:45:00.000-08:00

Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

We've enumerated some of truths and myths below, and invite you to visit the Truths & Myths post on the support group for more extensive followup discussion about your experiences with Google News. User Guides Marcela and Abe will be reading and responding to posts over the next few days. We hope that this post and the corresponding support group thread will help many of you improve your content coverage in Google News.

So without further delay, on to truths and myths:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself. There are some tips in our help center designed to help us include more of your images in Google News. We encourage you to check those out if you have had problems getting images included in the past.

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we've crawled it, they won't be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we'll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
Google News is constantly looking for the most recent developments in a story. Making sure we get the latest, breaking news articles is very important. However, whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won't affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won't help. Additionally, our system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story. If we detect that a source is constantly rewriting stories in order to game the system, we will flag the source in our system.

Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
While we will include articles that contain multimedia content, if our crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won't include the article. The bottom line here is that our crawler is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn't text-based, it won't be included in Google News. In the meantime, we're working to find ways to add more multimedia content such as our recent integration with video news from YouTube.

There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
As you've seen above, there are a number of reasons that your articles may not be included in Google News. To help you analyze your coverage, we have Webmaster Tools for news. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can create an account that will show you errors on specific articles.

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
Creating a sitemap for your news articles helps us find your content; if we can't find your content, we can't rank it. Creating a sitemap does not affect your article rankings; but there are still several reasons that creating a sitemap is a good idea. First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl. Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in.

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
Our crawler has been carefully tuned to scour the web for news content. If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. In such cases, the Support team may need to update the crawler so that it can find your new content. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team.

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH
Using AdSense doesn't have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn't be very objective!

We hope this information has been eye-opening, and encourage you to let us know what else you've heard on our Truth & Myths thread.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Up to the minute news with Comments

2008-11-12T00:33:00.000-08:00

Posted by Cliff, Ted and Namita, the Comments Team

In the several months since the launch of Comments, we've made some improvements that we wanted to let you know about. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Comments feature allows people mentioned in a story to comment on the articles in question. We think it's a great way to expose even more perspectives to you, the readers of Google News.

First, we've added a link on the Google News homepage that showcases all of the comments that are currently included in Google News.
By clicking on this link, you can review all of the expert comments. It's a great way to catch up on discussion around current news stories.

Also, to make it easier for commentors to submit comments, we've created a contact form to expedite this process. Currently, the ability to comment is only open to people who have been mentioned in a story or are related to an organization mentioned in a story. This form will make it easier for us to gather the information we need from them to get their comments into Google News as quickly as possible. For more information about the Comments feature, visit our help center pages. And to provide feedback on this, or any other part of Google News, visit our feature suggestions page.
Link - from Google News Blog
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Official google.org Blog: Tracking Flu Trends

Voice and Video now Available on Gmail Chat

2008-11-12T00:31:00.001-08:00

Google announced much awaited video capability for Gmail today. It is available for both versions of chat, Gmail chat and GTalk Client. Gmail chat users need to download a browser plugin to enable the “Voice and Video” option on Gmail chat. Click here to download the plugin.

This feature might not be available to all Gmail chat users immediately as the Gmail team plans to roll it out in the next one or two days. This feature is built on open-standards so that other applications and networks can interoperate with this feature on Gmail chat.

Google takes this launch one step further by offering discounts upto 30% on selected Logitech cameras at Buy.com. Click here to see the camera’s on offer.

This feature kind of completes the feature list for GTalk as now I don’t have to logon to any other service for a quick video chat.

Watch the video below to see how the Gmail Chat Video works.

Update: Voice and Video are currently available on Gmail chat only. GTalk Client does not carry this feature yet.

Attention Filmmakers: Who Wants To Go To Sundance?

2008-11-12T00:19:00.000-08:00

Project: Direct, YouTube's annual short film competition, is back to offer another talented filmmaker a chance to be discovered!

This year we've partnered with AOL Moviefone and The Sundance Film Festival to bring you this challenge: direct an original short film incorporating three specific props. One must be a red phone and the other two must be chosen from a list of 25 props that have played stand-out roles in some of the most memorable films to emerge from the Sundance Film Festival over the past 25 years. To choose your props, visit www.youtube.com/projectdirect.

Submissions open on November 16 and close at 9PM PST on December 14. A panel of Sundance Film Festival executives will review your film and whittle the competition down to 10 semi-finalists. Then, on December 27, the YouTube community will start voting for the winning film.

If you win, you'll be off to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where you'll meet with the Festival's Director of Programming and screen your film at a festival event. The top three films will also take home cash prizes and be distributed on DVD to industry executives at the Festival.

While the competition proper is only officially open to entrants in the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, Spain, Italy and France, everyone is welcome to submit and we will feature top films on the YouTube site.

Need some inspiration to get started? Check out last year's three finalists:

Visit the Project: Direct channel to learn more, and take advantage of a rare opportunity to introduce your work to both a global audience and key industry executives.

Good luck,
Sara P.
YouTube Film
Link
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New Google Search results pages for iPhone

2008-11-12T00:08:00.000-08:00

Starting today in the U.S., when you go to google.com on your iPhone and do a search, you'll see search results that are better optimized for your phone. You'll still get the full comprehensiveness and quality of regular Google Search results, but laid out in a more efficient and user-friendly arrangement.

Results are formatted to be neatly displayed on the mobile screen, so there's no need to scroll side to side. Local search results now include easier-to-press "Get Directions" and click-to-call links. Maps are shown by default in the case of a single listing or accessible by the "Show map" link for multiple listings. For those of you wanting to access the classic desktop search results format, it's only a click away, with the "Classic" link near the bottom of each page.

For now, the newly formatted results pages are available only in U.S. English and for iPhone and iPod touch firmware version 2.x. Over time, we intend to make the newly formatted results pages available through other search entry points on the iPhone, on additional devices, and in more language and country combinations.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky and Rob Stacey, Software Engineers, Google mobile team
Link - from Official Google Mobile Blog
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Improving performance with on-demand widget creation

2008-11-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

By Sumit Chandel, Google Web Toolkit Team

You may be happily coding away your GWT application, when you start to notice that as you keep enriching the application with new UI components, the load time starts to increase. If you're looking for ways to speed up your application, perhaps you should consider lazy loading in GWT application development - what we're coining "On-demand widget creation".

Lazy loading is a technique where a given object holds null references to other objects that later get instantiated only when they are needed. Actually, lazy loading is a concept that you may already be familiar with, but you may not know how it applies to GWT development. Hopefully this post helps you learn about how you can apply "on-demand widget creation" to speed up your own GWT applications.

A simple example of on-demand widget creation

Imagine your application looks something like a telephone directory listed alphabetically and split into three tabs (A-J, K-R, S-Z). Each tab contains a list of clickable names and phone numbers. Upon clicking an entry, you can access the contact address information as well as map it on an embedded Google Map located on the right side of the page, outside of the three tabs.

Initially, the code for the tab panel containing the list of names and phone numbers might look something like this:

String[] headings = new String[]{"A-J","K-R","S-Z"};

public void onModuleLoad() {
VerticalPanel verticalPanel = new VerticalPanel();

initializeGMap();

TabPanel directory = new TabPanel();
FlexTable listingAJ = new FlexTable();
FlexTable listingKR = new FlexTable();
FlexTable listingSZ = new FlexTable();

loadListings(listingAJ, headings[0]);
loadListings(listingKR, headings[1]);
loadListings(listingSZ, headings[2]);

directory.add(listingAJ, headings[0]);
directory.add(listingKR, headings[1]);
directory.add(listingSZ, headings[2]);

verticalPanel.add(directory);
verticalPanel.setSize("500px", "500px");

RootPanel.get().add(verticalPanel);
}

private void loadListings(FlexTable listings, String range) {
int numRows = listings.getRowCount();
if("A-J".equals(range)) {
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("John Doe", "555-3092"));
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("Jane Doe", "555-2039"));
} else if ("K-R".equals(range)) {
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("John Roe", "555-3123"));
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("John Koe", "555-9583"));
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("Jane Moe", "555-9503"));
} else if("S-Z".equals(range)) {
listings.setWidget(numRows++, 0, new Listing("Jane Zoe", "555-0945"));
}
}

This code seems good enough and it will work for what we expect out of our phone book. If you try it out in hosted mode, the phone book is quite responsive and usable. However, it's worthy to note that this example is over a limited population.

What if we wanted to do this for a much larger population - say that of New York City. We would be looking at roughly 8 million potential subscribers whose information we want to list. Assuming an even distribution between names across our three tab alphabetical division, this would mean showing 2.67 million entries in a single tab.

Ignoring the fact that this is an extreme example, you could imagine that trying to show that many entries on one tab is likely to freeze browsers and end your users' relationship with your application. However, the truth is that you don't even have to reach numbers in the 10^6 range for your users to start experiencing slowdowns, and our phone book application users will start feeling the pain even at a few hundred entries.

Let's suppose we were creating a phone book for a smaller population size, say that of Smalltown, Pennsylvania (population: 600). Here is when using "on-demand widget creation" can help - only render the widgets once you really need to see them.

Applying this as a first attempt to improving our phone book experience, we would end up with something like this:

public void onModuleLoad() {
VerticalPanel verticalPanel = new VerticalPanel();

initializeGMap();

final TabPanel directory = new TabPanel();
FlexTable listingAJ = new FlexTable();
ListingPlaceHolder listingKR = new ListingPlaceHolder();
ListingPlaceHolder listingSZ = new ListingPlaceHolder();

directory.addTabListener(new TabListener() {

public boolean onBeforeTabSelected(SourcesTabEvents sender, int tabIndex) {
Widget listing = directory.getWidget(tabIndex);
if(listing instanceof ListingPlaceHolder) {
FlexTable listingToLoad = new FlexTable();
loadListings(listingToLoad, headings[tabIndex]);
directory.remove(listing);
directory.insert(listingToLoad, headings[tabIndex], tabIndex);
}
return true;
}

public void onTabSelected(SourcesTabEvents sender, int tabIndex) {
}
});

loadListings(listingAJ, headings[0]);

directory.add(listingAJ, headings[0]);
directory.add(listingKR, headings[1]);
directory.add(listingSZ, headings[2]);

verticalPanel.add(directory);
verticalPanel.setSize("500px", "500px");

RootPanel.get().add(verticalPanel);
}

As shown in the code above, you can see that we're not instantiating the second and third tab listings just yet, and instead setting the tab content to an empty ListingPlaceHolder type. Further down in the code, you can see that we've added a new TabListener to the directory that is checking for when a given tab is selected and whether the selected tab has been instantiated yet. If not, it loads the listings for the tab and adds them to the directory tab panel.

Helping you be lazy - the LazyPanel

In the GWT incubator project, you can find the LazyPanel - a panel which allows you to easily load widgets on demand according to your lazy load strategy.

Using the LazyPanel is simple. All you need to do is add the widget that you want to lazily load in the lazy panel, and then call setVisible(true) on the lazy panel to actually have the widget load on demand. It's worth mentioning that the LazyPanel is mainly intended for use with widgets like the TabPanel and the StackPanel, and is not ideal in all cases.

Applying this to the phone book example, the recrafted code might look something like this:

public void onModuleLoad() {
VerticalPanel verticalPanel = new VerticalPanel();

initializeGMap();

TabPanel directory = new TabPanel();
LazyListingPanel listingAJ = new LazyListingPanel(headings[0]);
LazyListingPanel listingKR = new LazyListingPanel(headings[1]);
LazyListingPanel listingSZ = new LazyListingPanel(headings[2]);

listingAJ.setVisible(true);

directory.add(listingAJ, headings[0]);
directory.add(listingKR, headings[1]);
directory.add(listingSZ, headings[2]);

verticalPanel.add(directory);
verticalPanel.setSize("500px", "500px");

RootPanel.get().add(verticalPanel);
}

public class LazyListingPanel extends LazyPanel {

String range;

public LazyListingPanel(String range) {
this.range = range;
}

@Override
public FlexTable createWidget() {
FlexTable listings = new FlexTable();
loadListings(listings, range);
return listings;
}

private void loadListings(FlexTable listings, String range) {
...
}
}

And there you have it.

Choosing the right strategy

As mentioned just above, the LazyPanel isn't always the ideal choice for implementing an on-demand widget creation design. For example, one thing we mentioned about our phone book application is that each listing is clickable, and once clicked bring up an address popup. You could imagine that manually implementing the lazy load pattern for the address popup widget probably makes more sense than create LazyPanel instances for each address popup attached to each phone book listing.

Lazily loading your widgets has the obvious benefit of improving the load time performance of your application. It also allows you to control your application's memory usage as your user interacts with it, which can also be critically important since applications that tend to consume a lot of memory can potentially crash in the user's browser.

However, it is possible to overdo lazy loading and actually have it affect your application performance negatively. In fact, sometimes you want to do just the opposite and eagerly load parts of your application to improve performance.

After going through the simple example of on-demand widget creation and talking about its benefits, it may seem counter-intuitive to now say that sometimes it's better to eagerly load a part of the application. But there do indeed exist cases where it's better to eagerly load parts of your application to create a better user experience.

Take for example our phone book application. Let's say we now wanted to add different types of directories to our phone book - businesses, people and government institutions. If we were to apply the lazy load pattern the same way as we did for the personal listings from A-Z, we would be tempted to do the same here and only load the business listings once they were actually clicked on and asked for. Same for the government institution listings.

The average user probably spends most of their time looking up personal and business listings. For example, let's say a user is looking up his lawyer's number. He might first check the personal listing for "John Doe", and supposing he doesn't find it, switch to the business listings to see if the number is there.

Supposing the business listings are loaded on demand, the user might have to wait a quick but noticeable few milliseconds before the listings actually show up - time that might not have been spent waiting if the listings were already loaded. On the other hand, having the business listings load up in advance might slow down the initial application load time, not to mention incur some memory usage in addition to everything else that's already loaded.

Profiling your application

So, lazy loading is great but takes some planning. One of the decision points we just mentioned is how much memory the components you need to load will take up and how they affect initial load time of either your application or one of its larger components.

Aside from profiling your application to plan a lazy load strategy, it's generally useful to learn and apply profiling techniques during development so you can quickly identify hot spots and fix them. After making your final CSS tweaks, updated RPC calls and integrating a third party library and realizing that your application is now running ten times slower, it's important to locate and eliminate the slowdowns.

Because GWT application profiling is such an important topic, it seems appropriate to devote an entire blog post to just that topic, and then relating it back to lazy load strategy planning later. Stay tuned for next week where we'll show you different tools you can use to profile your GWT application and help iron out the wrinkles.

Link - from Google Web Toolkit Blog
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