Google Friends Newsletter

June 30, 2011

Hello Google Friends. We hope you enjoy this month's update on our newest products and services.

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POWER TIP

Voice Search on Desktop

You can now speak your web searches instead of typing them by clicking on the microphone icon on the right side of the search box. This can be particularly useful for hard-to-spell searches like [spaghetti with bolognese sauce] or complex searches like [translate to spanish where can I buy a hamburger]. Voice Search is currently available for Chrome users in U.S. English only.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/voicesearch.html

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NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES

Search by Image

You now have the option of searching with a photo instead of words at images.google.com. Click the camera icon in the search box and uploada photo from your computer or paste the URL of an image from the web. You can also drag and drop pictures from websites or your computer into the search box. You'll get relevant results about your image as well as similar images or the same image in different sizes or resolutions.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html

New Mobile Search features

Discovering places nearby just got easier with new shortcuts for commonly searched local categories, like restaurants, coffee shops and bars on the Google mobile homepage. You can also now add suggested phrases to the search box and “build” longer, more complex searches piece by piece. These features are available on www.google.com from the mobile browser for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices.
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-new-features-to-mobile_14.html

My Places on Google Maps

Keeping track of all the locations you care about and memorizing which places you starred or rated isn't easy. To help, we released the new My Places tab on Google Maps, which helps you quickly view and interact with your saved maps, starred locations and rated businesses.

The My Places tab replaces the My Maps tab in the Google Maps toolbar.
http://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces

Inside Search

We recently launched Inside Search, a one-stop shop for all search-related features, tips and tricks. Whether you're a beginner to web search or a search master, you'll find all the search shortcuts you need under the Features section of the site. You can also use the under-the-hood section to get a look at the technology behind Google Search. There are interactive diagrams with information on how far every query has to travel to get an answer back to you, how often we run experiments (we ran over 6000 in 2010 alone), how much time has gone into developing the algorithm and more.
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/

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MISCELLANY

So much for a sleepy summer—this June we made several big announcements. We added the +1 button to websites so you can recommend content all across the web. We broke all previous Doodle records with our playable guitar doodle in honor of Les Paul. Chromebooks went on sale to the public and we announced a series of design improvements across all our products, including Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail, taking place over the next few months. Finally, we launched Google+, a project that brings the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. Currently, Google+ is in an invitation-only field trial but we hope when you're invite arrives, you'll choose to join the project.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/doodle-for-instrumental-inventor.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/evolving-google-design-and-experience.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html

The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com

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