Google Friends Newsletter - July 2006 Greetings from the Googleplex to our esteemed readers. We hope you enjoy this monthly update on Google services and products. ======= POWER TIP Google Video Now there are more ways to play with Google Video. You can label and rate videos, or make comments about them for others to see. And now it's easier for you to add the videos you like directly to your blog, using the new "Email - Blog - Post to MySpace" button on the playback page. A few clicks and your current favorite is directly embedded into the most popular blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad, MySpace and LiveJournal. http://video.google.com ======= NEW PRODUCTS Google Checkout The new Google Checkout is a fast, easy way to shop online. We often hear people say, "Why do I have to re-enter the same billing, shipping, and credit card information every time I buy online?" Now you don't. You can buy from stores with a single Google sign-in - no more entering the same info over and over, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you'll see a little shopping cart icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. It's an easy way to identify fast, secure places to shop when you search. After you've placed your order, Google Checkout provides a purchase history where you can track your orders and shipping information in one place. http://checkout.google.com New features in Google Finance We launched Google Finance a few months ago, and now we've added some new features to enhance your Finance experience. We've included a stock-market module on the business section of Google News and Google Finance now supports multiple portfolios. We've also added an auto-suggest feature to the Google Finance search box to help you find the companies and funds you're searching for more quickly. There's also an auto-refresh feature that keeps the data on your portfolio page current. Lastly, we've been impressed by Seeking Alpha, a small company that offers free transcripts on many earnings calls, so we've added a link to this service as well. http://finance.google.com Accessible Web Search T.V. Raman, a senior research scientist here at Google, is blind, and he has just led an exciting project for us called Google Accessible Search. This new service (currently on Google Labs) adds a small twist to Google web search: in addition to finding the most relevant results from Google as usual, Accessible Search further prioritizes results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. When you search from the Accessible site, you'll get results that are prioritized based on their usability. This tends to favor pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which emphasizes search results based on specialized interests. http://labs.google.com/accessible Google Pack available internationally Our one-stop (free) shop for useful software just got more useful, as Google Pack is now available in 17 regions around the world: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.K. The Pack includes a batch of useful software like Firefox (for safer web browsing), Norton AntiVirus (to protect your PC), and RealPlayer (for playing popular media formats) plus a number of Google programs including Google Desktop, the Google Toolbar, and Picasa. The Google Updater keeps all the Pack programs current so you don't have to. http://pack.google.com ======= MISCELLANY + You are there + The rise of real-world mapping and geographical information online is truly exciting to many people because it offers a "you are there" feeling that words, photos and even video can't provide. Visual imagery of the world that can be followed over distances helps to deepen our understanding of the physical world. For this reason we really enjoyed working on the special Google Earth overlays of a recent real-time, real world event, the 103rd Tour de France. (It ended in Paris on July 23rd; the yellow jersey went to American Floyd Landis, riding for the Swiss team.) Now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth. The tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English. Pick your language on the Le Tour site, and once you've done that, look for the "Tour on Google Earth" link in the lefthand navigation under Route. Then you can watch the starts, the finishes, even information on each of the cities along the way. Just move the KML file into your "My Places" folder on Google Earth and revisit all 20 grueling stages. http://www.letour.fr/ http://earth.google.com -------------------------------------------------- The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large. http://googleblog.blogspot.com -------------------------------------------------- Google Friends archive: http://www.google.com/googlefriends/archive.html Google, Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 ### --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large. http://googleblog.blogspot.com -------------------------------------------------- Share Google Friends with a friend through Google Groups (includes subscribe/unsubscribe information). http://groups.google.com/group/google-friends -------------------------------------------------- Google Friends archive: http://www.google.com/googlefriends/archive.html To unsubscribe from the Google Friends Newsletter, send an empty message to: [email protected] Google, Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---