From Gmail with <3

Posted by David Murray, Associate Product Manager

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com. What better way to share the love with the people you care about than with Gmail chat with <3. And Gmail is available in over 40 interface languages (though <3 needs no translation).

But seriously folks, good relationships are built on good communication. There's no reason you should struggle to reach the ones you love, and Gmail helps you communicate fast and easily.

Update: Just for the heck of it, we enlisted the help of an ensemble cast we think you'll enjoy. Check out our 4-part video.

Strawberries are red, stems are green...

Posted by Dennis Hwang, Google Doodler

You may have noticed today's Google Doodle on our homepage in celebration of romance and good food (something we consider extremely important).

When you look at the logo, you may worry that we forgot our name overnight, skipped a letter, or have decided that "Googe" has a better ring to it. None of the above. I just know that those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately. And if you're feeling grouchy today, may I suggest eating a strawberry.

A very happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

About the Copiepresse decision

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs

Today we heard that the Belgian court, which last year ruled against us in the Copiepresse case has reaffirmed its original decision. This judgment is clearly disappointing, and we intend to appeal it because we believe that Google.be and Google News are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users. However, we are very pleased that the judge agreed Google should be given notice of articles and other material that content owners want removed. As we have in the past, we will honor all requests to remove such materials.

It is important to remember that both Google Web Search and Google News only ever show a few snippets of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the web publisher's site where the information resides.

Here's a quick summary of the case: Copiepresse represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It sued Google last August claiming that our search engine and news site breached these publications' copyright. In September, the court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, ordering us to remove these publishers' content from both Google.be and Google News. We complied with that order and also posted the ruling to both home pages.

Today's ruling does not affect the current content of Google News because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That's why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal.

We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

Happy V-Day...Fido?

Posted by Tom Oliveri, Group Product Marketing Manager, Checkout Team

One of the things I love most about Google is that I get to learn little bits about human nature all the time. This Valentine's Day, the Checkout team wanted to better understand the habits of V-Day shoppers, so we worked with Harris Interactive to conduct a survey with a variety of folks. We found out all sorts of interesting things about the nature of the holiday, what people like to shop for, and who people shop for -- for instance, this year, the family dog is more likely to get a little something for V-Day than Dad is.

There's plenty more where that came from, and the findings might interest you. Read more on the Checkout blog.

Congratulations are in order

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering

I'm delighted to congratulate Alon Halevy and Peter Norvig, two Googlers who have been selected for the 2006 class of ACM Fellows.

This is a great honor, and a recognition of extraordinary contributions to the computing community. Peter, who was our first director of search quality and is currently director of Google Research, has been recognized for his many contributions to the disciplines of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. Alon, who recently joined us from the University of Washington and now leads one of our structured data initiatives, has been honored for his contributions in data integration and knowledge representation.

We'd like to thank each of them along with the other ACM Fellows for their hard work and innovative thinking. In many ways, these distinguished scientists and engineers have helped shape computing into something that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They've also raised the bar on what it means to be a great computer scientist or a great engineer, which makes our work that much more interesting.

Voulez-vous...collaborate...avec moi ce soir?

Posted by Kevin Systrom, Associate Product Marketing Manager

For those of you who don't speak French: I don't either. But that's OK, because as I was writing this post in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I simply added my French-speaking friend Nick, who confirmed that my two years of high-school French have not paid off. The title aside, we wanted to let you know that Google Docs & Spreadsheets, our handy online document and spreadsheet editor, now comes in 12 more languages. That's 11 if you don't count English for the UK, where the only difference is the word 'color' (colour).

The other languages we've added are: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. If your favorite language isn't listed here, we've got an additional 18 languages in our spell-checker. Visit docs.google.com to try it out.

There's more: Google Toolbar 3 for Firefox is now out of beta and available in all the same languages. In this new version, you can open your documents and spreadsheets directly in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Give it a try.

Who links to your site?

Posted by By Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Webmaster Central

At Webmaster Central, we are all about communicating with webmasters about their sites in the Google index. We want to provide as much information as we can to help webmasters understand how their sites perform and how to improve their results. And we want to get input from the site owners, who after all know their sites best. We spend a lot of time talking with, and getting feedback from, webmasters. One request we hear a lot is to show which pages link to a site. You could always get a sub-sampled list of backlinks by using the link: operator, but now, as the owner of a site, you can get a much larger list in the Webmaster Tools component of Webmaster Central.

Head on over to this post on our Webmaster Central blog for all the details, and then log into Webmaster tools to see what sites link to you. We hope this gives you greater insight about your visitor traffic as well as how your site is linked throughout the web.