Finding government info

Posted by Kevin Gough, Product Manager

Want to find those IRS forms to get in your taxes on time? Need to figure out where to send your DMV fees, or find the phone number for your local parks and rec department? Google U.S. Government Search launches today -- it's a site on which you can 1) search across a huge index of U.S. Federal, state and local government websites via a single search box, and 2) stay up to date through personalized content feeds from government agencies and press outlets. Off you go.

For easy bookmarking, go to http://usgov.google.com.

The 36th edition of Google News is Arabic

Posted by Mohamed Elfeky, Software Engineer

As we increase the number of languages supported in Google News, and as the number of Arabic news sources available on the web grows, now there's Google News in Arabic. This edition is a little different than the other 35: normally, we target editions to a specific region like a country, but the Arabic edition targets the entire Arab region of the world -- so Arabic speakers from more than 20 countries have access to an especially wide variety of perspectives on the news being published in their language.

Arabic readers can visit the Google News homepage to see a compilation of links to top news headlines all in one view, look for news just in their favorite categories, or search within news stories for particular terms. We're glad to be launching Google News for a whole new audience, and we look forward to bringing it to even more people around the world.

It’s all about the photos

Posted by Adrian Graham, Product Manager

Reading feedback from Picasa users is one of the best parts of my job. And lately the feedback has been especially clear and direct: please offer an easy way to share photos online. Today, we’re delighted to begin testing a new Picasa feature that does just that. It’s called Picasa Web Albums.

In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. It’s all about the photos. And now we’ve tried to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. Just pick a bunch of your photos from Picasa and upload them into a web album in a couple of clicks. Once they’re online, it’s super-easy to share them – click the “Share” button from anywhere on the site or, just email friends the URL for your public gallery.

Take a look at the photos that our tester wants to share: Try flipping through photos using the arrow keys (we pre-fetch photos so they load quickly). Zoom in and out to check out details or see the whole photo. Or maximize them on a large monitor. We focused on the photos, not ads or archiving, because we know how important your photos are to you especially when you want to share them. Of course, there's a lot we want to add and improve — which is why for the moment, we're only testing this feature by invitation. If you’re interested in making your own Picasa Web Albums (and helping us make it better), give us your Gmail address here. We’ll be sending out invitations first come, first served.

Once you have an invitation, you’ll be able to download the latest version of Picasa with the web uploading feature. And actually, it’s not just about web uploading -- there’s also downloading. We wanted to make sure you can keep enjoying the photos your friends have shared with you. With this in mind, when viewing others’ galleries, you can download an entire album of photos directly into Picasa with just a couple of clicks. For uploading and downloading to and from Picasa Web Albums, you’ll need the new version of Picasa – again, it’s only available to invited users for the time being.

Finally, you may be wondering if this costs anything. No, and no hidden fees either. Picasa is free as always, and Picasa Web Albums comes with 250MB of free storage space. That’s enough for approximately 1,000 wallpaper-sized photos at 1600 pixels each. We also offer an easy-to-understand storage upgrade option if you have a whole lot more pictures to share.

We’re working hard to make both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums better. And we’re excited to start making our most commonly-requested feature available to more people. Try it out and tell us what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

The Bard's the thing

Posted by Jen Grant, Google Book Search team

Summer in New York: kids running through fountains, steamy subways, P. Diddy's White Party in the Hamptons, and ... Shakespeare. Today, Shakespeare in the Park kicks off its 50th year with free performances of Macbeth in Central Park. To help celebrate (and because we love a good excuse to delve into old books), we've created a place to find and search the complete plays of Shakespeare. Here, book lovers and theater fans alike can explore popular favorites and lesser-known gems right from their desktops with Google Book Search. (Note that some print versions of Shakespeare's plays may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world. Where copyright status is in question, we protect the publisher by showing the Snippet View. As always, we encourage you to let us know if you believe a publication should be in Full Book View, and we hope you bear with us as we confirm the status and, whenever appropriate, change the display.)

Finally, if you want to learn more about how Book Search is helping people around the world browse and discover books of all kinds, be sure to check out our new blog too.

More gadgets, more places

Posted by Sophia Brueckner, Software Engineer

We've released the Personalized Homepage feature in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand, so that more of you around the world can put the information you want on your Google homepage.

And given the football frenzy now underway, we've included the gadget for the World Cup in these new editions to make live scores, standings and schedules available. So hop to it now for soccer updates or other info (like news, weather, recent Gmail messages, and feeds from your favorite sites).

Happy Birthday, Google Earth

Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth and Google Maps

We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions. And we should say "salut," "ciao," "hallo," and "hola" to our French, Italian, German and Spanish users, because Google Earth is now fully localized for those languages in addition to English. This includes a UI localized to French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as local search, driving directions, geo-coding, and unique local information layers for those countries.

Got data?
The streamlined new UI is bound to make you crave new places to explore, so we put together a little update to our database — we increased our global coverage by about 4X. Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway — that about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution. Google Earth has had medium resolution global satellite coverage since the beginning. But that was at 15 meters per pixel. This new global coverage was produced in conjunction with our exclusive satellite partner, Digital Globe, and is at approximately 70 cm per pixel. We have even better data for many countries, up to 10 cm per pixel.

What global insights can this new data produce? Google Earth has already helped save tsunami, hurricane, and earthquake victims, not to mention find a lost Roman villa, track severe storms, discover new meteor craters, track the outbreak of avian flu, visually index magazine articles and photos, host travel videos, redefine the house-shopping process, track airplanes in flight, recognize every Medal of Honor recipient, and many other uses we never expected. Only time will tell what it will bring, and it will only be fully realized when energetic and creative people use powerful tools like KML to exploit the new data and features.

Why not KML in Maps?
We asked that too. KML is such an amazingly flexible way to create and share geographic information - whether it's sharing vacation photos with your friends or publishing important data like the realtime earthquake feed from the U.S. Geological Survey — we thought it would be useful to be able to view KML in Google Maps. So here it is! You can now view KML in Maps by entering the URL for your KML file. To browse hundreds of thousands of interesting KML files, see what the half million members of the Google Earth Community have created.

Feeling inspired?
Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse have enabled creative individuals around the world to model their world in 3D. A new version of SketchUp is available today that enables the export of fully-textured 3D models to 3D Warehouse and Google Earth. This will bring even more realism to the collectively-authored 3D world SketchUp users are creating.

Ready to mashup?
Our legion of Maps API developers asked us to support geocoding. So we decided to push that out today too. Street-level geocoding is now available for the U.S., Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Let the mashing begin.
Correction: Street-level geocoding is not available in Japan.

Are you enterprising?
Finally, now there's Google Maps for Enterprise, offering a fee-based service and support for businesses that want to embed a Google Maps experience in their websites or internal applications. It leverages the Google Maps API to enable businesses to map customer locations, track shipments, manage facilities or view any other data source in a geographic context.

Whew. I'm exhausted from writing all of that. Our first year has been a busy one. We hope you enjoy these latest efforts in our mission to geographically organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Movers, shakers and hoops on video

Posted by Jon Steinback, Product Marketing Manager

There are so many videos available on Google Video that we don't always know where to start, so we turned to you viewers to help us decide what to watch. We use algorithms to identify videos that are suddenly becoming popular, and then rank them based on how popular they are -- and how suddenly they became popular. We've been using this list internally, and now it's ready to share with you, so check it out. Right now this feature highlights videos from close to 40 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and New Zealand, to name a few.

And by the way, we're guessing there might be some interest in the NBA Finals, too. We're not going to miss a minute -- and now, neither will you.