Toolbar, now with advanced translation

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 4:25 PM

(Editor's note: This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog. We know Australians love to travel, so a great use of this new Toolbar feature might be to help plan your next trip. Booking hotels in Asia, flights in Europe and information on areas off the beaten track; all now easily translated with one click).

If you saw this text on a webpage, how would you figure out what it means?

Если вы читаете этот текст, вы, вероятно, уже говорите по-русски. Однако миллионы людей не знают русского и не могут прочитать миллионы русскоязычных веб- страниц.*

You would likely need to translate manually via our language tools or in Toolbar. Today we're excited to announce that translations will be even easier with the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We have been working with the Translate team to make translations a faster and more integrated part of your browsing experience.

The Translate feature automatically detects if the language of a webpage you're on is different from your default language setting and allows you to translate it. With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language.


Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google until you choose to translate a page. You can find more details about how the feature works in our help centre.

If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you'll get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.

The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Download Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer to try it out for yourself. We'll add this feature to Toolbar for Firefox soon, too.

* In case you don't speak Russian, we translated the paragraph above for you using our translation engine:

If you are reading this text, you probably already speak in Russian. However, millions of people do not know Russian and cannot read the millions of Russian language webpages.

Posted by Jerry Tang and Dick Sites, Software Engineers

Free Google Message Security for primary and secondary schools with Google Apps Education Edition

at 7:23 AM

Since we launched Google Apps in 2006, thousands of schools, businesses and organisations globally have adopted Google's cloud-based communication and collaboration tools - helping them increase productivity and effectiveness, reduce cost, and increase security. In fact, we announced today that more than four million students worldwide are using Google Apps in their classrooms.

Here in Australia and New Zealand, educators are embracing cloud computing, helping them achieve a wide range of learning outcomes and, most importantly, making learning fun.

Earlier this year, the New South Wales Department of Education followed the lead of the University of Waikato, the University of Auckland, and Macquarie University when they successfully migrated 1.2 million students to Google Apps. At the completion of the project, Stephen Wilson (the Chief Information Officer at the NSW DET) said: "Gmail has been working flawlessly, particularly considering that we could roll it out in a few months. It’s going fantastically and without a hitch”. Soon after, the the University of Adelaide migrated 16,000 students to Google Apps at no cost to the University.

Google Apps has proved popular at smaller schools across Australia and New Zealand too. "With Google Apps we've been able to offer communication and collaboration resources to our students and teachers which rival that of any school in the world ... all without having to worry about servers, maintenance and other overheads," says Michael Merrylees, Principal at Christ the King Anglican College in Cobram, Victoria. "Our students and teachers use Google Apps every day; like any good communication and collaboration system it simply disappears into the background, working without a hitch day after day."

As a company that's committed to constant innovation, we'd like to make it even easier for primary and secondary (K12) schools to use our tools. Today we're announcing that Google Message Security will be offered free to current and new eligible K12 Google Apps customers that opt-in to Google Message Security – powered by Postini – by July 2010. Google Message Security lets administrators limit messages based on who they're from, who they're going to, or the content they contain. Message rules can be applied to groups of users, making it easy to customise the scheme for different groups (for instance younger students, older students, and teachers).

And to further support primary and secondary education, we're launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share and learn more about Google Apps, as well as the Google Apps Education resource centre with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans. We're committed to providing even more educational resources in the future - watch this space!

Posted by Andrew Mitchell, Google Apps Team

Aussie developers at Google Wave API Day

Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 10:54 AM

The Sydney-based Google team proudly previewed Google Wave to developers at Google I/O at the end of May. We wanted to celebrate this launch with Aussie developers and kickstart a thriving local Wave community, so we held an all day hackathon in the office last Friday. About 80 developers attended the event, representing media companies like Fairfax and Telstra, nearby universities like UNSW and UTS, open-source projects like Jetty, and everything in between. After a day of talks, brainstorming lunches and a good five hours of hacking, 25 developers (or teams, as many came with their colleagues or made new friends) were ready to show off their demos.

The most common types of demos were games - Hangman, Connect 4, Boxes, Competitive Tetris, Werewolf, Zork, "World's Simplest Game", "World's 2nd Simplest Game" - and search - cheap flights, Flickr, OZ TV listings, tours, definitions, acronyms. Several developers experimented with the mobile platform, with two gadgets performing geolocation on the iPhone (one using the browser's geolocation property, the other using the native app capabilities), and a robot proxying Wave requests on the Android. We also saw a few moderating bots (thinking about swearing on Wave? think again!) and a bot that kindly agrees with everything you say (even if you swear!). The crowd favourites, voted on at the end, were Napkin Gadget - a collaborative Flash app for doodling, Syntaxy - a robot that adds syntax highlighting to Python code, and Pong - a gadget demonstrating low latency lag between clients.

All in all, it was a fantastic day. We loved meeting so many developers and seeing your great ideas come to life, and we're looking forward to watching the Australian Wave community grow. For information on upcoming developer events (and more Wave hackathons) in the Sydney area, subscribe to our developer events mailing list. In the meantime, check out this slideshow of photos from the day:

Wave API Day

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

An Ode to Google

Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:29 PM

We know there are some happy Google users out there, but they're not always moved to poetry ... unlike Natalie (pictured below), whose spontaneous 'Ode to Google' we liked so much that we just had to share ...

An Ode to Google
By Natalie

The only one I can turn to when times get tough;
Or when I want to find out why that patch of skin on the back of my left thigh has become a little rough.

Sometimes I just wanna find out the simple things, like how to mentally recover from kissing my colleague at work drinks last night;
And other times I delve into the more complex, like how to change the bulb for my bedroom light.

Even to my most specific questions, you always have an answer;
Whether I ask “How do I make my Elton John sweater ‘off the shoulder’?”, or “Who the hell is Tony Danzer?”

You always know just what to say;
You’ve never made me feel annoying, or told me to ‘just go away!’.

You’ve linked me to some of the best and directed me away from all of the rest;
Provided visual stimulation for significant events, taught me how to self-examine my own breasts.

My sanity (questionable) has been maintained; our relationship OBVIOUSLY pre-ordained;
My love for you is undeniable, your existence in my life undoubtedly vital.

So, next time I want to find out the answers to life’s most nagging questions:
why Tyra Banks hasn’t been axed yet/
whether or not you pronounce the ‘B’ in debt;
why the English are so grumpy/
why tracksuit pants make me (but not my best friend) look frumpy...

I know who I will turn to, and that is you,
Google.


Nice work Natalie!

Posted by Annie Baxter, Google Communications

How to get ready for the new interface

Friday, June 12, 2009 at 4:04 PM

By now you probably know that we've been working on a new interface for AdWords to help you save time managing your account and get even better results from your campaigns.

We've built a number of new features that make managing your campaigns faster and easier: more graphs to track your performance over time, integrated reports that provide ready access to detailed search and content network data, and faster editing to help you make changes quickly.

You've probably received an email from us letting you know that your account will be converted to the new interface in the coming weeks. Today we have two release updates to share with you: we've recently made the new interface available to everyone who uses AdWords Standard Edition, and we've begun the migration process with a small number of accounts.

In our email, we stated that you would have at least 30 days before we update your account. This 30 day period is a minimum; in fact, most advertisers will have more than 30 days before their accounts are upgraded. We're taking a gradual and deliberate approach to ensure a smooth transition, and we won't upgrade your account until we're confident that the new interface meets your advertising needs.

So, how should you prepare for the transition to the new interface? First, the single most important resource to help you get up to speed is the new interface microsite. Here you can find short videos explaining the benefits of the new interface, a before and after guide, and even a short quiz you can take to make sure you're ready for the changes.

Next, if you haven't explored the new interface yet, now is a good time; try it by signing in to your AdWords account. If you notice any issues that make it difficult to manage your campaigns in the new interface, please let us know right away by submitting feedback.

If you've already sent us feedback on the new interface, thank you! We're listening closely to your comments and are working to fix the problems you've reported. Examples of top issues we're working on are wide pages that require too much scrolling, and slow load times for some types of browsers and Internet connections.

We've already made a number of changes in response to your feedback, and this week we've released updates to the new interface that address many of the top issues we've heard. And we're not done yet; we'll continue to make ongoing improvements to the new interface over time.

For those of you who joined the beta test early, we hope you like how the new AdWords interface has improved. And for those of you just getting started, we hope you're already noticing a few of the ways the new interface can help you get more out of your AdWords campaigns.

Posted by Jeremy Wood, Product Specialist Team

Sydney student on shortlist for Google Photography Prize ... and opportunity to get creative with Chrome

at 10:42 AM

Today we announced the 36 shortlisted candidates for the Google Photography Prize, including one winner from Australia. We launched the competition in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery to find talented student photographers and give them online and offline exposure. Over 3,500 entries were received from 82 countries, including Australia, India, Moldova, Poland, Ghana, France, Germany, Chile, Peru, Mexico, the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia.

The shortlist of the thirty-six top entries is now open to an online public vote here. The top six vote-getters will be flown to London for the opening night of an exhibition of their work at the Saatchi Gallery, and the ultimate winner will be decided by a panel of respected art critics and artists, including Idris Khan, Martin Parr, Michael Hoppen, Susanna Brown, Tim Marlow and Mariella Frostrup.

Shortlisted candidate Fleur Audet, a student at the University of New South Wales, submitted six winning images that reflect her everyday experiences.


"I approached developing my entry for the iGoogle Photography Competition much like I approach a lot of my work: without too much thought and with gut instinct. Within 10 minutes of reading the guidelines for the competition I’d chosen 5 photos that I liked the most, which I’d decided would be my simple selection criteria. My thought process was something along the line of ‘If I like them, hopefully other people will too." Fleur explains.

"The inherent theme in my photographs is of the everyday and the commonplace. It’s hard to describe the incredible allure of the everyday photograph. They are passing moments often disregarded in their mediocrity and familiarity, I find myself drawn to them. It’s looking over your fence into your neighbour’s backyard on an autumn afternoon and seeing leaves in their pool and thinking - I must record it."


The six winning submissions will be available for millions of Google users around the world to display on their personalised iGoogle homepages, and given a special exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. The overall winner will also receive £5,000 and an invitation to spend a day with renowned photographer Martin Parr.

Another project we're announcing today is an opportunity to get really creative with the Chrome logo ... we're inviting people to film themselves building the logo any way they want. We've created some inspirational ideas which you can check out below... and you can find more info here. Have fun!



Posted by Katharina Friedrich, Product Marketing Manager

Supporting National E-Security Awareness Week

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 5:27 PM

Once again, this year we're proud to partner with the Australian Government for National E-security Awareness Week, between 5–12 June 2009. We share a commitment to helping you secure yourself and your information on the internet.

The week is designed to raise awareness of the steps that you can take to keep yourself and your family secure online. If you do nothing else all week, stop for a moment to come up with a better, stronger password for your personal online accounts and transactions.

For advice on passwords, and other e-security information, go to www.staysmartonline.gov.au



Google has a large number of initiatives to help keep you and your computer secure (many of which are detailed on our official Online Security Blog and Australian Google Safety Tips Page). For example:

In conjunction with Stop Badware.org, we place warnings in our search results for websites that our testing has determined to host or distribute badware. If you search for a site that Google has determined to be potentially dangerous, you will see a warning in the search results.

Earlier this year we launched the Australian Safety Centre on YouTube, containing straightforward online safety tips and resources from experts and prominent Australian safety organisations including Bravehearts, Reach Out, Kids Helpline, NetAlert.gov.au and Cybersmart Kids Online.

We offer all Australians a free collection of software (Google Pack), which contains Norton Security Scan and Spyware Doctor Starter Edition, to detect and remove viruses, worms, spyware, adware, trojans and keyloggers.

Posted by Iarla Flynn, senior public policy manager Australia