Instant gratification - your way

Posted by Peiling Yao, Google Mobile Team

In the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, do you remember Veruca Salt, the girl who kept screaming, "I want it NOW, daddy!" Well, that's pretty much how I feel about searching the web on my mobile phone. It takes longer for pages to load, and it's not easy entering text in the first place - so I want the answer NOW, Google!

For all you Verucas out there, we engineers have been working on three new Google search features for mobile phones. Starting today, if you type [movies] or [weather] and a location, or enter a stock ticker symbol, we'll show, predictably enough, movie showtimes, weather forecasts, or live stock quotes above the Google web search results that display on your phone.

Talk about instant gratification - and the best part? No golden tickets required.

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Powered by Google

Posted by Shaluinn Fullove for the "Powered" Team

This past weekend 10 Googlers competed at Hood to Coast - the largest relay race in the world - where more than 1,000 teams start at the top of Mt. Hood (11,249 feet) and race 200 miles to the coast of Oregon. This was our rookie year, and our team, "Powered by Google," included Nathan Stoll, Bismarck Lepe, David King, Katie Hotchkiss, Sean Knapp, Michaela Prescott, Natalie Criou, Dan Brown, Tyrona Heath, and me.

Armed with a flashlight and decked out in a reflective vest, Nathan started us off at 7:45 Friday night with a 6-mile run down the face of the mountain. The runners on deck hopped on Van #1 to cheer him on and meet him at the next exchange. The runners who weren't on call until the second stage headed to the nearest Best Western Pony Soldier Inn for some spaghetti and shut-eye.

At the sixth leg exchange Sean passed the baton to Michaela and the race continued through the midnight hour while our starters headed back to the Pony Soldier for a 60-minute power nap. After refueling on Red Bull, coffee, power gels, and turkey sandwiches from a nearby gas station mini-mart, we caught up with Van #2 as the sun rose over Portland. From there, through the dusty back roads and increasing temperatures, we continued passing the baton in 4-8 mile intervals.



It all went smoothly until we met an 18-minute logistical error at exchange 24 (read: we lost Van #2) and then had a flat tire at exchange 29. But we rebounded with solid performances in the final legs, making up much lost ground. Finally, cloaked in a Google jersey, our anchor leg, Sean, crossed the finish line in 22 hours, 19 minutes, and 17 seconds.

In the time it took us to reach the coast, we had each run an average of 20 miles at 6:48/mile. We captured a third place finish in the "corporate mixed" division, and a top 50 finish overall, out of 1,063 teams.



Not bad for a bunch of first-timers. Just wait until next year: we won't be rookies anymore.

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Small is beautiful

Posted by Alan Strohm, Google Mobile team

Back in June, we introduced Google Sitemaps, a beta program that lets webmasters inform Google quickly about new or updated web pages, and boost Google index coverage of their web pages.

The thing is, working on the Google Mobile team, you learn that desktop computers and mobile phones aren't created equal. (For one, your desktop won't fit in your front pocket.) At first, the Google Sitemaps program didn't support web pages designed to fit the smaller screens of mobile phones.

We've fixed that. Starting today, webmasters of sites of all sizes can submit their mobile website URLs to Google Mobile Sitemaps, an extension of the Google Sitemaps program. And just as cool, mobile phone users can search through these, and other mobile-friendly websites, using Google Search for the Mobile Web. Here's to the little guy (or device, rather)!

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"Sign up for Gmail"

Posted by Keith Coleman, Gmail Product Manager

It's pretty exciting to see those words on the Gmail homepage. For the last 16 months, a lot of people have been asking us how they can sign up for Gmail, and today we're happy to be able to say, "Just go to gmail.com." From there, you can get an invitation code sent to your mobile phone, and with this code, you can create a Gmail account. Once you have Gmail, you can try out our brand new IM and voice service, Google Talk.

Why use mobile phones? It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.

We're also working on some new mobile features that will make your Google account more useful and secure, such as SMS alerts and password recovery. When you sign up using your mobile phone, you can choose to save your number with your account so you can use these features as soon as they become available.

Right now, sign-ups only work with U.S. mobile phone numbers, but we're eager to support others. With Gmail now available in 29 languages (and counting), we're already working hard to bring you "注册 Gmail 邮箱," "Зарегистрироваться в системе Gmail," "Abra sua conta no Gmail" and many more.

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Google gets to talking

Posted by David Bau, Google Talk software engineer

Google has a friendly talk-in-the-hallway kind of culture that I love, but Google engineers seem to be everywhere now, from Bangalore to Tokyo to Dublin to Zurich. I work on a team that's in Mountain View, Kirkland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. We like to talk about the projects we're working on, but a hallway is hard to come by. So we've put together a gadget that keeps us talking, even when we're on different sides of the planet.

It's called Google Talk — a small program that lets you call and IM other Google Talk friends over the Internet for free. We're releasing it in beta today for all Gmail users (once you sign on, you can start inviting any of your friends to try it too).

The sound is great — usually much better than a regular phone — and it's a perfect way to use that computer microphone you never realized you had. My laptop with its built-in mic makes a superb speakerphone. Google Talk also works great with just about any standard mic or headset you can plug in to a computer.

We're already finding that Google Talk is pretty useful, as it's great to be able to see when friends are awake and online in London, Tokyo, or the exotic Kirkland Public Library. And of course it's wonderful to be able to ring friends on a whim, without having to dial all those pesky country codes.

Geeks in particular might notice that the Google Talk service runs on the open XMPP protocol. So even though many people will log on using Google Talk, you can also use iChat, GAIM, Trillian, Adium, Psi, or another one of the many great XMPP clients out there.

There's a reason for that openness. We believe Internet communication networks should openly interoperate, and that they should include IM and voice. The openness of the Google Talk service to XMPP clients is just a start. We like SIP too, and we want to also federate between servers. We've already started working with our friends at EarthLink and Sipphone to federate our respective real-time communications services so all our users can talk to each other for free. If you're interested in federating with us or would like to interoperate in a way that we have not yet implemented, let us know.

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Introducing Desktop 2

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

At Google we’re never satisfied. Last fall we released Google Desktop Search, which finds reams of information of all kinds on your computer with Google-fast speed and accuracy. But then our product people got to thinking: what about when you’re feeling kind of lazy? Wouldn’t it be cool if your information could come to you, both from the web and from your own computer?

So today we’re pleased to introduce Google Desktop 2, whose new features include:

-- Sidebar, an intelligent desktop panel that gives you continually updated personalized info like your email, photos, stock prices, weather, RSS and Atom feeds, and so on. All of it is automatically customized for you, and ever-more-precisely tailored to your own interests based on how you use your computer. Think of Sidebar as an information valet who’s really resourceful, conscientious and insightful (and whose salary is zero).

-- Expanded and improved desktop search. If it’s on your hard drive and we can’t find it, you might want to ask yourself whether you really need it - and if you do, you might want to download a plug-in, or build one yourself.

-- Quick Find, which lets you search your hard drive to find files and launch applications as fast as you can type.

-- Outlook search and integration. If you’re an Outlook user, this is probably your dream come true.

You can learn more about Desktop 2 here. Enjoy.

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The machines do the translating

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist

This year, Google entered the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Machine Translation evaluation, an event that has taken place annually since 2001 to support research in this area and to improve the state of the art. Participants included university labs, industrial labs, government labs and commercial machine translation companies from all over the world.

Our approach was to use statistical translation models learned from parallel text, that is, sets of documents and their translations. The system learns a model automatically from the parallel data. This approach differs from the rule-based approach used by many existing commercial machine translation companies which is based on large sets of handwritten translation rules.

We're very pleased with the results of this evaluation. Our computing infrastructure allows us to do a lot of experiments and work with huge data sets very easily.

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