Choose your News

Posted by Erin Earl, Google Mobile Software Engineer

Have you ever noticed that in waiting rooms, the section of the newspaper you most want to read is either missing from the magazine rack, or someone else is reading it? It’s made me a real master of finding all the hidden pictures on the covers of Highlights magazine. Don’t even try asking me Where’s Waldo? I've found him 10 times already.

That’s what’s cool about Google News for mobile devices. You can access the news you want, whenever you want, by using a search box, top headline listings, and browsable news categories. Just type google.com on your web-enabled phone, and click the link to Google News. Goodbye, Waldo. Hello, everything else.

Updated with Wikipedia entry to Waldo/Wally.

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An update on payments

Posted by Benjamin Ling, Product Manager & Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager

There's been a lot of interest and speculation about what Google is doing with payments. We thought we'd give you a quick update on what we've done so far and what we see down the road.

If you take a look at the history of Google's advertising programs and online services, one thing you notice is that online billing and payments have been a core part of our offerings for some time. To run our ad programs, Google receives payments every day from advertisers, and then pays out a portion of those funds to advertising partners. Over the past four years, Google has billed advertisers in 65 countries more than $11.2 billion in 48 currencies, and made payments to advertising partners of more than $3.9 billion. When one of our consumer services requires payment to us, we've also provided users a purchase option.

As the number of Google services has increased, we've continued to build on our core payment features and migrate to a standard process for people to buy our services with a Google Account. Examples of this migration include enabling users to buy Google Video content, Google Earth licenses, and Google Store items with their Google Accounts. We also just began offering similar functionality on Google Base.

Looking ahead, we want to continue building payment services that meet the needs of Google users and advertisers. We expect to add payment functionality to Google services where our users need a way to buy online. For us, it's all about bringing our users a better online experience whether they're searching or buying.

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History deserves the best

Posted by Jon Steinback, Product Marketing Manager, Google Video

In junior high, I learned about most of history's greatest moments through the least engaging media possible: the yellowed pages of outdated textbooks or the unfocused projections of film strips on my classroom walls. For many momentous events, words and pictures don't transmit the full sense of what has transpired. To see for one's self, through video and audio, brings an event to life. Over 70 years ago, the National Archives was founded with the express purpose of preserving these moments in their full glory, serving America by documenting our government and our nation. This includes truly momentous events like the moon landing, as well as rare historical footage like government documentaries from the 1930s and battlefield stories from World War II.

Today we're very pleased to tell you that we're helping the National Archives take one step closer to realizing its vision. Together, we're launching a pilot program to digitize their video content and offer it to everyone in the world for free. I think both students and teachers can agree that any of these would make for an exciting day in the classroom:

- Allied patrols in action on Anzio beach
- Reclamation and the Arid West
- The Eagle Has Landed 1969

It's so refreshing to see history conveyed with more clarity than a filmstrip can offer.

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Mac Widget time

Posted by Jonathan Berger, Mac Applications team

Q. Which fruit was not an iMac color: Blueberry, Lime, Strawberry, Orange, Grape?

Q. Which phrase is not originally from Steve: "insanely great," "There's one more thing," or "Great artists steal"?

Q. Where did the famous 1984 commercial air?

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A. The orange iMac was called "tangerine."

A. Although Steve has been known to use "Good artists create. Great artists steal," that second sentence originated with Pablo Picasso.

A. Half-credit if you named Super Bowl XVIII on January 24, 1984. The commercial also aired in Twin Falls, Idaho to qualify for 1983's advertising awards.


If you correctly answered these questions, chances are good you want to know about three Mac Dashboard Widgets that Google has created for OS X Tiger. The Blogger Widget enables quick and easy posting to your blog. Checking your Gmail inbox becomes a matter of pressing F12 with the Gmail Widget. And the Search History Widget allows you find that website you saw last week while searching Google. We'd also like to acknowledge the many great Google widgets people have already created, available on the Apple downloads page.

These widgets, which sprang from the brains of some engineers in their 20% time, are a small step towards bringing our software to a variety of platforms. Want to play? Check out our job listings and come build more Mac stuff with us.

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Google, girls and engineering

Posted by Emily Nishi, Diversity Program Manager

Did you know that it's National Engineers Week in the U.S. -- and that February 23 is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day? The week-long celebration aims to raise public awareness of the many contributions engineers have made to our quality of life, and intrigue young students with the many wonders and possibilities in an engineer's work.

Throughout this week, several Google offices, including New York, Kirkland and Mountain View, have been hosting a couple of hundred girls from local middle schools and high schools to come visit us for the day. The girls have the unique opportunity to shadow a Google engineer or two, go to interactive workshops, eat in our yummy cafes (the pizzas are a hit!) and get an insider's tour of the Google offices.

We hope these girls get a real-life sense of what it's like to work here, and more important, that we've piqued their interests and ultimately help steer them toward future careers in math, science and engineering. Let's hear it for the girls!

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A query less ordinary

Posted by Roger Skubowius, Software Engineer

A lot of our work in the mobile space has been about delivering quick answers to everyday questions. Services like Google SMS, Personalized Home, and Local for mobile bring you movie times, phone numbers, the latest news headlines and directions from point A to point B.

But what about those problems that are a little less everyday? What if, say, you're out somewhere and absolutely must know if that new Super Monkey Ball game for the Nintendo DS is in stores yet?

If you search for [Super Monkey Ball DS release date] in an ordinary web browser on your PC, your first result is this complex, graphics-rich page. Search that same phrase on Google with your mobile phone, though, and your top result is this lightweight, phone-friendly version of the same page. That's because now whenever you click on a Google search result through your mobile web browser, Google automatically translates the page's layout to make it as easy as possible to read on a small screen. We also break long-winded web pages into smaller pieces and do our best to show you the portion that's relevant to your query, first.

The whole idea is to get you the information you want as quickly as possible, so you can spend less time downloading and scrolling through long documents on a pocket-sized screen, and more time (what else?) playing Super Monkey Ball.

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Google.org's new director

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP, Global Online Sales & Operations

We are excited to announce the appointment of Larry Brilliant as executive director of Google.org. Google is extremely fortunate to have found in Dr. Brilliant the combination of experience in building and scaling successful programs and ventures in the fields of medicine, philanthropy and technology. His passion for making an impact by tackling some of the most difficult international health issues facing humanity is exactly what we hope he will bring to bear as he helps shape Google’s philanthropic mission and strategic goals.

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