Sun05192013

Last update02:06:21 PM GMT

Back Google 2009

2009

Google City Tours Simplifies Trip Planning - Adds Walking Directions, Custom Maps

  • PDF

San Francisco -- The team at Google Labs last summer introduced a new service dubbed as Google City Tours, one of the ongoing projects by Google Labs team that has tweaked the interface that generated a tour of various attractions near a location including real walking directions and My Maps integration within walking distance of the starting point--making it more friendly as to how people actually vacation: head to a city, pick places to go, and get precise directions to them.

It fine tuned the service as it still had some rough edges, but it proved useful enough to become quite popular. It had a few major catches, though some of which have since been rectified by the developers team which is now providing an update on their progress.

Google Analytics Adds New Annotation Feature

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Google Analytics is one of the most robust offerings by the search giant and with its recent release of Google Analytics new features, it has almost become ubiquitous for a large number of companies reaping benefits from it. The Mountain View, Calif., company has just rolled out another set of pretty impressive new features. It includes “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.

This newly launched “annotations” feature which enables you to make comments and bookmark major campaigns on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days within your statistics for future reference. Although, many people criticize against the amount of data that Google has at its disposal as a result of their analytics offering. This will help to explain a spike or drop in traffic to other members within your organization, without having to dig through the past.

Google Confirms January 5 Android Media Event

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- It may be the much-anticipated moment the tech industry has been waiting for as Google apparently seems well prepared to give outsiders a glimpse at its latest vision of the world-changing possibilities of smartphones -- Google has officially scheduled an Android-related press event to be held next Tuesday, January 5 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters.

The Mountain View search giant dispatched invitations to various members of the media Tuesday, without disclosing any specifics about what is in store, to be held just days ahead of the annual CES gadget fest gets under way in Las Vegas.

Google Assists Businesses Locate AdWords Professionals In Beta

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Companies that are looking for some assistance with their AdWords campaign may now rejoice to receive some thanks to Google. Google has launched a beta search platform that allows people to search for AdWords Professionals those certified by the company who can help manage their campaigns based on location and budget.

On the new Google Professionals Search homepage, people can search by location and budget they wish to allocate on a weekly basis, and allows you to find people who are approved by the Google Adwords Professional certification.

Google Starts Off Holiday Fashion Celebrates Christmas With Latest “Postcard Doodle”

  • PDF

San Francisco -- With all the latest Internet toys, and gadgets, Google has marked the start of the holiday season with the latest in a series of “Postcard Doodles” to mark special occasions and celebrations period. The image, the newest and more innovative designs in an extended tributes from Google, shows a small boat on a mountain lake and a festive building on the shoreline.

Google is famous for their innovative logos that commemorate major events. To start things off, Google is now displaying an image of a post card over the regular logo, rolling out a number of Holiday Wishes logos that they plan on rotating for the rest of the Holiday season, which is followed by the previous day's picture of a palm tree on the postcard that replaces the second half of the usual multi-coloured logo.

Google Fetching DocVerse -- Targets Microsoft Office

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Google, which is reportedly busy tracking valuable start-ups, it seems that the Mountain View, company may be on the brink of acquiring yet again another company. This time the search giant is eying a San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that enables users to collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, according to source with knowledge of the deal.

According to published reports from various sources, this deal would be the latest in a string of acquisitions by Google, which recently pledged to make around one acquisition a month. This acquisition could strengthen Google's recent Appjet purchase. Appjet is the maker of Etherpad, which also offers Microsoft Office collaboration capabilities. Google is reportedly shelling out about US $25 million for the startup.

YouTube Hops On Twitter Bandwagon With URL Shortener

  • PDF

San Francisco -- Search engine giant Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site YouTube has joined Google and Facebook in the latest bid to improve the way they spread across the web by launching its own URL shortener -- Youtu.be. The move apparently comes as the world starts to cut down its URLs to use in the likes of Twitter.

Speaking on the Official YouTube Blog, the video-hosting site said that it hopes cool things will be possible with the new service.

URL shorteners seems to have lived their heyday since earlier this year when every other startup was in the link shortening business, with an increasing number of web users using services such as TinyURL and bit.ly to condense links so that they can be shared more easily on social networking sites such as Twitter, which imposes a limit on the number of characters that can be contained within a single message.

Yelp Reportedly Rejects Google's $500 Million Acquisition Offer

  • PDF

San Francisco -- Yelp has rejected Google's acquisition offer, estimated at about $550 million. TechCrunch, which last week citing anonymous sources said a progressive discussion between Google Inc. to acquire Yelp, the popular review site Yelp was “very likely to close,” now says the deal is off-- and that Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman “has walked out for reasons unknown”.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote that he is not sure what “went wrong that made Yelp turnaround from the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they are not interested to sell, say multiple sources.”

French Court Imposed €300,000 In Fines Against Google's Book Scanning Project

  • PDF

Paris -- A French court last week imposed an astounding amount of fine €300,000 ($430,000), against Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet-search engine, for copyright infringement and ordered the search giant to pull all the scanned books off its site, a Paris court ruled today.

The Paris Civil Court stated that Google breached the French copyrights of two groups representing publishers, editors and authors, for scanning entire books or excerpts that are put on line, “Google has committed acts of copyright violation to the detriment of Le Seuil” and to publisher Editions du Seuil SAS, which filed the lawsuit.

“Google violated author copyright laws by entirely reproducing and making accessible on the site” books owned by Seuil without its permission, the court wrote in a 22-page decision.

Google Reportedly Making Bid To Acquire Yelp

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- According to various media reports suggesting that Google Inc., world's most popular Internet search engine, is making a bid to acquire the popular San Francisco do-it-yourself review site Yelp Inc., the site that allows users to review restaurants, bars, shops and more, potentially providing the search giant an opportunity to reach deeper into the local business market for more than $500 million, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The two companies have held discussions in the past, but serious talks about a deal are believed to have started several months ago. According to Technology blog TechCrunch and the New York Times quoting marked the discussions as “advanced” and “serious,” respectively, quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the deal.

Google Adds 50 New Media Partners To “Fast Flip” Online News Project

  • PDF

San Francisco -- Internet giant Google amid criticism from media companies, now continuing to appease the dying newspaper industry, has added more than dozens 24 media partners to its online news reader “Fast Flip,” including the Tribune and McClatchy newspaper groups, the Huffington Post and Politico, bringing the total number of newspapers, magazines and blogs in the project to nearly 100.

Google says the Fast Flip project, an early-stage experimental program launched about three months ago, which is designed to make web articles in a magazine-style layout with 'pages' that readers can turn from several online news sources making it easily readably while also anticipating to make some sort of revenue for the publishers and obviously itself.

Google Adds One Button Duplicate Contacts Sorter To Easily Merge In Gmail

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Managing your contacts can be a pretty irksome task, especially when you have multiple instances of your contacts scattered all over the place. Global search leader Google, earlier this week introduced a new feature Gmail dubbed as contact manager that searches for duplicate contacts and then lets you instantly merge duplicate contacts with the press of a button.

If you have imported contacts from other applications, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or moved from another webmail service such as Hotmail, it is possible that many of your contacts have duplicate entries. Previously, users had to screen through their address book one at a time -- a process that could be both tedious and time-consuming.

Google Earth Hits The Road In Style -- Integrated Into New Audi A8

  • PDF

Los Angeles -- The Germans are great admirer of their cars and occasionally they add innovative gadgets in the newest models they export around the world. Search engine giant Google, another creative thinker is partnering with German car manufacturer Audi to include Google Earth and a number of other Google services in its flagship luxury sedan, the new Audi A8.

The 2010 Audi A8 sports a new feature not available in any other automobile: Audi is the first automobile maker to incorporate Google Earth into its cars, with others sure to play along the German's lead.

Google And Facebook Launches Custom URL Shorteners

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Google and Facebook are each set to embark into new territory on Monday with the launch of a new URL-shortening service, a tool that modifies a long internet address in to a much shorter string of random characters such as Goo.gl, potentially shaking up the sector and putting pressure on established players such as Bit.ly and TinyURL.com.

Apart from some currently available high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Google's new URL shortener, goo.gl is not an all-purpose link reducer that users can access by going to a standalone site. The roll-out appears to be targeted at increasing user engagement with services such as Twitter, which relies on short 140-character messages.

Google To Introduce Android Smart Phone In 2010, A Latest Blow To Apple Iphone

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- In its latest attempt to make headway in the lucrative mobile market around the globe, search engine titan Google Inc. is developing its own proprietary Android smartphone dubbed as “Nexus One,” to be released in early 2010 without a mobile carrier partner, marks a new push by the company to take on Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. in the smart-phone market, analysts said.

Google, confirmed the announcement in a blog post this weekend on the Google Mobile blog, and Google engineers around the world are covertly distributed an Android handset to company employees for testing -- known in the internal circle as “Nexus One”.

Google Goggles: Searches The World By Sight And Sound

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Google's latest Goggles application for Android devices helps annotate the world around you. Google search is now getting both sight and sound, moving beyond the typically typed key words to let people scour the Internet with mobile telephone cameras or spoken words in multiple languages. A new Google service Monday unveiled as “Goggles” application that allows smartphone users to take a picture and submit it as a query to Google's search engine.

The new application, which was announced earlier this week, enabled smartphone users take a snap and search using pictures instead of words. It is available on phones that are run by Google's mobile operating system Android, which states on its homepage: “No need to type your search any more. Just take a picture.”

Offline Gmail Graduates From Google Labs, Integrated Into Gmail

  • PDF

New York -- Barely a year since Google first launched “Offline Gmail,” the feature has now graduated beyond Gmails Labs and is now officially become a standard Gmail feature, of the Webmail service.

About a year ago, Offline Gmail was introduced in the Labs as an experimental feature in Gmail. It functioned in Google Gears to enable users to cache email on the local computer, so that access was possible even when offline.

Google made the announcement yesterday, as part of the company's commitment toward speeding up its final product roll outs, posting message with operating instructions to activate the tool and highlighting some of its new capabilities.

Google Partners With NY Times, Wash Post To Develop Online News Story

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- Search engine giant Google, whose controversial news aggregation service Google News, which has recently drawn the ire of news publisher, is teaming up with The Washington Post and The New York Times to create a new online tool that is designed to rank articles on major news stories as they develop. The feature, named as Living Stories, is intended to offer a diverse online news experience by creating a singular page where readers can follow one story line in the news as new developments occur.

“The concept behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online,” Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, wrote in a blog post.

“We are thrilled to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them,” they said.

Google Unveils Real-Time Results With Photo Search Features

  • PDF

Mountain View, California -- In a flurry of major announcements as promised, Google on Monday revived the nature and scope of Internet search, unveiling considerable changes to its dominant search engine Google with some new features, including real-time search results, voice-driven translation, and image recognition capabilities with refurbished focus on mobile search, a move likely to leave competitors wondering what hit them.

As part of its much-awaited move into the real-time search arena with a new latest results feature, the search giant said that over the next few days Google its users would begin viewing search results with brand-new tweets, blog items, news articles and social networking updates drawn each second from sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Unlike the rest of Google's nitty-gritty Web presentation, latest results will be dynamic and presented in a scrolling view, with new updates swooshing in as they are captured by Google's gravitational pull. The integration of real-time Twitter updates into Google search is potentially huge. It ads a wealth of information to the world's most popular search engine, for better or for worse.

Google Extends Personalized Search Results To All Users

  • PDF

San Francisco -- Global search engine leader Google gambled attracting the wrath of privacy advocates last weekend as it now proposes to deliver customized search results available to all of its users, whether they are signed into a Google account -- should be a wake-up call to those concerned about what the company knows about them and how it is used.

For many of its search fans, Google has now began offering Web search results that are customized based on their previous search history and clicks. For example, if someone consistently visits a particular sports site, Google, using a cookie placed on users' machines to track their search behavior and when they again look up sports topics in its search engine.

Google Acquires Online Collaboration Startup “AppJet” To Boost Wave

  • PDF

San Francisco -- Google seems to be hurrying to get its holiday shopping done, having just acquired its fourth company in less than a month. In order to boost its recently invited Wave product, Google on Friday said it is buying the San Francisco based online collaboration startup “AppJet,” which makes the EtherPad real-time workgroup collaboration application and merging its technology with an innovative Wave communication platform the Internet giant is creating.

AppJet provides a product that reflects certain features of Google Wave, only since it has been around for a little longer, may have one or more legs up.

“AppJet is molded into a group of highly-talented entrepreneurs with deep expertise in real-time web collaboration. Google and AppJet have a commen vision of how web collaboration can benefit users, and we are excited to have the AppJet team contribute to the success of Google Wave,” a Google spokesman said via e-mail on Friday.