google

Google released the first stable build for Chrome 6. The new version has a simplified user interface: there's a single menu, the "go" button has been removed, the browser no longer shows "http://" in the address bar, the bookmark button has been moved to the right and the toolbar has a new color scheme.



Chrome 6 adds support for form autofill and you can now synchronize autofill data, extensions and all their settings. Extension sync is probably the coolest new feature in Chrome 6 because you can take your extensions with you, not matter what computer your are using.


Another new feature is the support for WebM videos. "WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web," which is already supported by software like Opera, VLC, Winamp and by YouTube. Watch this video in Chrome 6 or switch to YouTube's HTML5 player.
There's also a feature that's disabled by default (probably because it's buggy): the built-in PDF viewer. You can enable it by typing chrome://plugins/ in the address bar and clicking "Enable" next to "Chrome PDF Viewer".

Google tests a tweaked user interface for the navigation bar. The experiment removes link underlining, changes the background color when you mouse over a link from the navigation bar and adds an icon for the settings menu.

(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)

Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.

Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.


Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience.

Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.




Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.

Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.

If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Fans of single-malt scotch whisky associate single malts from the Isle of Islay in Scotland with bold and peaty flavors. Not every whisky produced on the island is heavily peated, but that’s the signature flavour of the distilleries along the southern coast. The Isle of Islay is located on the Western edge of Scotland, just north of the sea barriers of Ireland, yet it is the southernmost of the Hebrides. Islay is home to eight active distilleries (with a ninth in production) and whisky tourism plays a major role in the economy of the island.

Google Street View offers glimpses of some of the most-famed distilleries in the world, while also providing some sense of the land—and water—that makes their products so unique. Also, some of these distilleries have top-notch signage and branding.

Let’s start with my own personal favourite: Laphroaig. Unfortunately, the Street View car committed the brutal error of not turning down the path onto the distillery grounds, but you can clearly see the distillery sign.

Should you find yourself on the Isle of Islay: make that turn!

Less than a kilometre to the East is the famed Lagavulin. I would say that Lagavulin is my favourite single-malt, but a bottle of Lagavulin 16 year (at least in the U.S.) costs more than twice the price of a bottle of Laphroaig 10 year—and that’s just not practical for some of us working folk. Luckily, Lagavulin is right on the main road (A846) and we can see much of the grounds:

And the distillery sign on the building:

And a tour of the distillery in progress:

Just a kilometre to the east of Lagavulin is the Ardbeg distillery. It’s also not right on the main road, but we can get a pretty good view of it—complete with grazing sheep, chimneys, and the sea.

And here’s the sign for the distillery:

The main inlet of the Isle of Islay is the Loch Indaal. On the southeastern shore of the Loch, we find Bowmore, the capital of the island and home to one of the oldest distilleries in Scotland. It’s still a relatively small operation:

And here’s the distillery gate:

On the northern coast of Loch Indaal is a recently revived distillery: Bruichladdich (pronounced Brook-laddie). Bruichladdich has maybe the best distillery sign in the world:

Look at that still! Looking directly across the street from Bruichladdich provides an excellent view of Loch Indaal.

On the eastern shore of Islay, near Port Askaig, we find the distilleries of Caol Ila and Bunnahabhain. Caol Ila is right on the water and from the street we can see their excellent distillery sign, complete with oak barrel:

Bunnahabhain is situated in an ecologically rich area, and the distillery has a beautiful view of the sound and the Isle of Jura:

The Kilchoman distillery is way over on the western shore of Islay, the most westerly distillery in Scotland. It’s also one of the newest, having been founded in 2005. You can barely see the distillery from the road.

If you’re in the neighborhood, the small town of Kilchoman is also home to a spectacular old graveyard and abandoned church.

The newest distillery on Islay is in Port Charlotte. The project is owned by Bruichladdich and they are taking a serious approach to perfecting their craft with the new distillery.

Each of the whisky-producing regions of Scotland is full of history and unique geography. The Isle of Islay and its peaty whiskies are just one of the many wonders of Scotland’s whisky industry.

Locations: Scotland / Categories: Buildings, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

View in Google Earth

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You're reading an entry from Google Sightseeing, which is copyright © 2010 Alex Turnbull & James Turnbull and must not be reproduced without permission.

Hello. My name is Tyler, and this is the first post in my new, ongoing series: Back to Basics.

Our regular readers will be familiar with most of the information covered in this series. However, we have many first-time visitors who are just getting their feet wet. Although they are new, they are eager to learn. If you are a regular reader, you can help out the newbies by leaving a helpful comment.

(Image Credit: Robbie Ewing)

Because this is the SEO Hosting blog, the question we most frequently receive from first-time visitors is “what is SEO?”

Search engine optimization (SEO) consists of two parts: on-page and off-page.

On-page: The first purpose of on-page SEO is to ensure that search engines can access a website’s content. Because search engines use robots to crawl the pages of a website, websites need to be free of technical issues that could interfere with the robots’ ability to crawl.

The second purpose of on-page SEO is to optimize website pages to rank well in search engines. While this purpose of on-page SEO has aspects that are still relevant, the overall impact of this purpose has decreased as search engines have evolved.

Off-page: The primary purpose of off-page SEO is obtaining links to a website from other websites. Authority and relevance determine the value of a link.

SEO practices are commonly labeled with a hat color. The intent of labeling is to show whether a practice is ethical (white hat) or unethical (black hat). However, while some practices obviously fall into one category or the other, the majority of SEO practices fall somewhere in the middle.

Until recently, SEO was commonly viewed by the public as a dark art or magic. A lack of public education, as well as misinformation or negative experiences with fake SEO gurus who were only skilled at making a quick buck through deception, caused this perception.

However, over the past year, two factors have lead to a more public acceptance of SEO. The first is the mainstream media’s realization that the Internet is not simply going to disappear. As a result, the mainstream media has begun embracing SEO to attract more visitors to their websites.

The second factor is the media attention given to Demand Media. Demand Media is categorized as a mass content producer that relies heavily on SEO to attract visitors. While Demand Media is commonly vilified by the media, the attention they have received has shown the public that SEO is now viewed as a legitimate practice at the corporate level.

If you are a first-time visitor and have a question about SEO, please leave your question in a comment. You can also email your question to me at tyler@copymoz.com.

It’s been 10 years since the first version of Google SketchUp was released, and there are more people modeling in SketchUp now that we ever could have imagined—over a million of you a week, in fact. That’s a pretty humbling number of 3D model makers.

People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8, the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us.

Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling.


Posted by Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager

Recently, Adam Sherk did some research and came up with a list of the most overused buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases. For anyone who writes press releases or companies that use them, this list is an eye-opener and a definite must read. It’s a good reminder that marketing speak has no place in press releases, and it’s a handy checklist for making sure it hasn’t sneaked in without you realizing it.

But why doesn’t marketing speak have a place in your press releases? After all, isn’t the end goal of press release distribution to create a buzz and, you know, market your company?

Sure, you want to get your name out there, but that doesn’t mean you should treat press releases like advertisements. They’re not. They’re news, not ads. And last time I checked, marketing speak and buzzwords have no place in legitimate news.

And if you’re actually aiming to get your press releases picked up by worthwhile media outlets, you’d better steer clear of any and all marketing speak. Remember, reporters are interested in finding good stories and interesting news. They’re not interested in marketing your company. And with the typical reporter receiving as many as hundreds of press releases each week, you can be sure that if yours is filled with buzzwords, it will find its way into the trash can.

How can you make sure your press release is free of any marketing speak?

• Avoid superlatives—Press releases aren’t the place for exaggerations. So, stay away from words like “leader”, “best”, “top”, “greatest”, and other words that are “the most” of something. Believe it or not, not every company can be the “leader” or the “best.” So, play it straight.
• Check out the buzzword list—Earlier in this post, I linked out to a list of the most overused buzzwords in press releases. Take the time to read over that list. Hell, print it out and use it as a checklist every time you send out a press release.
• Use keywords instead—Press releases can be very helpful for SEO press releases. So, instead of stuffing them full of buzzwords, try using important keywords in the press releases headline, subhead, and body. Just make sure you don’t fall into any of the common SEO press release pitfalls.
• Focus on the facts—News is about fact, not opinion. So, if you can’t back something up, don’t include it in your press release. Just the facts, please.

Are you guilty of slipping marketing lingo into your press releases?

Jay Wang developed a Google Chrome extension for this blog. The extension lets you read all the posts, it keeps track of the posts you've read and it notifies you when there's a new post. The search feature lets you find posts from this blog and from Google's official blogs.


Jay Wang's extension is a great combination between Firefox's live bookmarks and Google Reader, so it might eventually be used to subscribe to any site.
{ Thanks, Jay. }

Recognising our literary passion, technical knowledge, and expertise in the online mapping field¹, the web’s 57th most popular website, HubPages, have asked Alex and I to join thier expert panel and judge entries to their latest contest “HubPages Marks the Spot”.

Contestants are invited to write a 300 word geo-located guide about local attractions or holiday destinations using that week’s theme, and they could win up to $500.

The contest starts on September 1st and full details and entry requirements are available on HubPages.

Categories: Site News

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You're reading an entry from Google Sightseeing, which is copyright © 2010 Alex Turnbull & James Turnbull and must not be reproduced without permission.

This is the latest post in our series on the future of display advertising. Today, director of product management Jonathan Bellack looks at our efforts to help online publishers generate more advertising revenue - Ed.

For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what’s new, let alone grow their business?

We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

We’ve previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:

• AdSense, which places the most valuable, relevant ads on our partners’ websites, without the publishers having to sell the ad space themselves;
• DoubleClick for Publishers, our ad serving platform, which maximizes the value of ad space that publishers have directly sold themselves;
• DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time auction marketplace, which maximizes large publishers’ overall returns, by "dynamically allocating" the highest value ad, whether directly sold, or indirectly sold through an ad network.

I wanted to highlight the key principles guiding our future product innovations in this area, as we work to help all publishers maximize their online ad revenues.

1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes.

Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.

Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of “immediate ad” will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.

2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.

New ad serving and “dynamic allocation” technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers’ revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher’s revenues can never truly be maximized.

In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.

3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we’ve been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.

By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they’ll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that’s buried under their own sites.

4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher’s ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers’ ad space. Of course, at the same time, we’re also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.

Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.

This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding “advertising apps” for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.

5. Everything is going to be “display”
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They’re turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We’ve designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.

Looking forward, what we call “display” today will just be “advertising”—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser’s campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That’s the future we envisage.

An exciting time ahead
We’re unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There’s great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We’ll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.
Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management

Google acquired yet another social gaming company: SocialDeck. The start-up had an interesting idea: creating a platform for playing games on any device. "SocialDeck was founded in 2008 with the vision of enabling 'anywhere, anytime, anyone' gaming. The company has launched several titles for the iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry using its social gaming platform technology, which enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks," explains SocialDeck's site.

It should be obvious that Google doesn't buy companies like SocialDeck to develop games. Most likely, Google wants to create a platform for social gaming that will enable users to play the same game on an Android device, on an iPhone, on a computer, on a Chrome OS tablet, in Google Me or any other social network that uses Google's platform.

Here's an overview of SocialDeck's gaming platform:


{ via Inside Social Games }

Whenever I interview a new client to help plan their copy, one of the questions I ask is this:

What are some common of your customers’ concerns and questions they have when talking to you? Objections, points of confusion, etc. How do you address these?

Why is this important? It’s simple. There are many roadblocks between your target audience and making the sale. If you don’t address these roadblocks and offer solutions in your marketing messages, guess what happens? They don’t buy from you.

It’s that simple. So, how can you destroy these roadblocks and make the sale? Let’s take these one at a time.

Common Objections

Objections are those things that make customers resist the purchase. Every company gets objections from customers when trying to sell their product or services. The key to overcoming these objections is to understand why the prospect objects, what you can do to negate their objection, and how you can turn that objection into the customer’s advantage.

Some common objections include:

• Price—This boils down to the customer having a problem justifying spending their money on your product. There are many things you can do to overcome pricing objections. Show customers why your product is a great value at its price point (no matter how expensive it might be), offer money-back guarantees, or show how the product is a worthwhile investment.
• Lack of understanding—Sometimes, customers just don’t understand what you’re selling. So, their kneejerk reaction is to say “no.” What can you do? Clarify your message. Make it as simple and to the point as possible. Write it so even your mom understands it.
• Lack of trust—Customers may not trust you. You can gain their trust by using testimonials, offering money-back guarantees, being easy to contact, sharing your expertise, and more.
• Questions—In some cases, the customer just needs to know more before they’ll give you the sale. Your copy needs to address the common questions your customers have. Pay attention to the questions you get asked most often, and find ways to answer them in your copy.

How do you overcome your customers’ objections?

Last year, I posted about a new Gmail feature that will prioritize important messages. This feature will soon be available in Google Apps and it's called Priority Inbox.

"Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now we've improved Gmail's filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules. Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else. Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over)."

Gmail also adds two buttons that let you classify messages as important or unimportant, just like the "Mark as spam" and "Not spam" buttons. Unlike spam filtering, finding important messages is more difficult because you can't use information from other accounts to classify messages.

Google has to build a personalized classifier for each Gmail user and it needs a lot of messages, so that's probably the reason why the feature is launched in Google Apps. "Email importance ranking works best for people who receive a lot of email," explains Google. Google takes into account implicit signals like: the messages from people you frequently email are important, if a message includes words frequently used in other messages you usually read then it's probably important, the messages you star are probably more important than the messages you archive without opening.

Priority Inbox will be available in Google Apps next week, but you'll only see it if the administrator has enabled "pre-release features".

{ Thanks, Niranjan and Tillmann. }

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:



As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:



As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking Google Translate. We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.

Google Translate’s shiny new coat of paint

With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can search across languages on Google using Google Translate? Or that you can translate incoming email in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.

We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:



It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.

Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to share your story with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the Google Translate blog!
Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

A couple months ago while visiting our London office, I noticed a really cool Google logo on the wall. It was a mosaic of photos of London that had been created by a product manager named Clay Bavor and a team of Googlers (in fact, Clay wrote about it). As a few of us admired the wall, we thought there must be other Googlers who could create something equally cool and fun. So we cooked up a little contest for the product management team: create your own version of a “Googley Art Wall” and the team with the best entry wins a nice dinner out and a donation to the charity of its choice.

When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.

Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai interactive wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.



People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.


Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management

By now, some of you may have noticed our new Google Mobile YouTube channel, with a fresh look that includes a video box that rotates along multiple axes (we love the Rubik’s Cube here at Google). As you click on and discover more videos, we hope you’ll have fun checking out all the ways the box can turn.

In our channel’s “featured” section, we highlight some of our mobile search capabilities -- like search by voice, sight, and location -- that really help you take advantage of your phone’s unique technology. Since we understand that these represent new modes of searching for many of you, we’re going to launch some new videos that help illustrate the variety of practical and fun ways that you can use these features. To start with, check out our “Shoot This” series of videos for Google Goggles. Goggles can actually recognize much more than just bar codes and book covers, and these videos really let you take Goggles for a test drive. You can navigate through these videos by clicking on the embedded annotations to fast-forward or rewind.

When looking at “all apps,” you can not only check out any of our latest videos at a glance, but also quickly sort them by mobile platform or by app. We’ve also made it easier for you to share videos by email or through popular social networking sites.


We hope you enjoy trying out our new Google Mobile YouTube channel. We’ll be adding many more new videos, so please visit youtube.com/googlemobile and subscribe. Also, if you’ve already subscribed to our old channel, note that you need to subscribe to the new one separately.


Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing, Google Mobile

What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser. Called “The Wilderness Downtown”, the project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google. Building this project on the web and for the browser allowed us to craft an experience that is not only personalized, but also deeply personal for each viewer. “The Wilderness Downtown” takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in. It’s set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album The Suburbs (which you may be familiar with, especially if you were one of 3.7 million viewers who live-streamed Arcade Fire's concert on YouTube earlier this month). The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen.


“The Wilderness Downtown” was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

We hope you enjoy it.
Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab