Google Toolbar 7—cleaner, fresher and faster

Today we’re bringing the speed of Google Instant to the latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We’re also introducing a fresh, clean look that personalizes Toolbar with the tools you use most.

Toolbar Instant
If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome, you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant. Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster.



You can also type Alt+G to get to the Toolbar search box more quickly.

To enable Toolbar Instant, visit Toolbar Options and click “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing.” Toolbar Instant works on IE8 and IE9; if you’re on an older browser, you can either upgrade your Internet Explorer version or try Instant in Chrome, which includes many of the same tools you’re familiar with in Toolbar.

Personalized Toolbar
This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new “More” button.

As you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled. You can learn more about this personalization at our Help Center.

Making Toolbar work for you
Some Google Toolbar features, such as PageRank and spell check, require sharing some information with Google in order to function properly. With Google Toolbar 7, we’ve made it easier for you to control your privacy settings. From a single settings menu, you can decide which of these features you'd like to enable and which ones you'd like to stay off.

We’ve also continued to improve the performance of Toolbar 7 without slowing down your browser, making it one of the fastest add-ons you can use in Internet Explorer.

Google Toolbar 7 is available in English on our download page and will be coming to our other supported languages over the next week. If you’re already using Toolbar, you’ll automatically be updated to the new version over the next few weeks. You can also find out more about Toolbar on our features page.

Posted by Allen Huang, Associate Product Manager, Toolbar

The royal wedding live on YouTube

Cross-posted on the YouTube Blog.

As the historic day approaches, the much-anticipated wedding of Britain's Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton has people around the world buzzing with excitement.

While millions will be in London for the big day, it's clear that people around the world have wedding fever. Google search trends show that in addition to the UK and the US, the top ten countries searching for “royal wedding” include places like Singapore and the Philippines. In response, we've been working to make as much of the big day as possible accessible to everyone. We previously announced the expansion of our Google Earth 3D imagery to offer a “Royals’-eye” view of the entire wedding procession, complete with 3D images of iconic landmarks and five species of digital trees that can be seen along the route.

Today, we’re thrilled that the Royal Household has just announced that footage of the entire ceremony will be live-streamed on their official YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel.

The live stream will begin at 10:00a BST (9:00a GMT, 2:00a PT, 5:00a ET) on Friday, April 29, and will follow the wedding procession, marriage ceremony at Westminster Abbey and balcony kiss. Alongside the live stream, The Royal Channel will also feature live blog commentary of the event to give timely updates and insights as the day unfolds. For those of you in different time zones, the footage will be reshown in its entirety directly following the event and will be available in full on the site to view afterwards.

You don’t have to wait until the big day to "attend" the wedding, though. A video guest book has just been opened on The Royal Channel for anyone in the YouTube community to upload messages of congratulations, inspiration or well wishes to the happy couple.

More than 50 years ago, the marriage of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and Antony Armstrong-Jones was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television and had over 20 million viewers. This one is already heralded as the first of the Internet age, where for the first time in thousands of years of royal history, the moment will be captured online and preserved forever.

Posted by Rachel Ball, Partner Development Associate

Add your local knowledge to the map with Google Map Maker for the United States

[Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long Blog]

Before Google Map Maker—a product that enables people to add to and update the map for locations around the world—only 15 percent of the world’s population had detailed online maps of their neighborhoods. Using Map Maker, people have built out and edited the maps for 183 countries and regions around the world, and now, due to the contributions of citizen cartographers, 30 percent of people have detailed online maps of the places they live.

Map Maker users have mapped entire cities, road networks and universities that were never previously recorded online. These contributions have been incorporated into Google Maps and Google Earth, so the collective expertise of the Map Maker community benefits the millions of people using these products globally.

Today we’re opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store.

You can help make the map complete in other ways as well, such as marking the bike lanes in your town or adding all of the buildings on your university campus so they appear in Google Maps. We’ve seen incredibly detailed contributions from power users worldwide, including this comprehensive map of IIT Bombay. We’re eager to see you add the same level of detail to locations in the United States.

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

To confirm Map Maker user contributions are accurate, each edit will be reviewed. After approval, the edits will appear in Google Maps within minutes—dramatically speeding up the time it takes for online maps to reflect the often-changing physical world. To see examples of what people around the world are adding to Map Maker, you can watch mapping in real-time.

In addition to opening Map Maker for the United States, we’ve added some new features for users globally. You can now get a street-level perspective on places with Street View imagery directly in Map Maker, see and edit all points of interest, and find exactly what you’re looking for with advanced search options such as displaying all railroad tracks.

Browsing all points of interest in downtown Palo Alto, California

To learn more, check out our getting started site, or start mapping now at mapmaker.google.com.

Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Tech Lead and Manik Gupta, Product Manager, Google Map Maker

Shepherding the wind

We recently invested approximately $100 million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, anticipated to be the largest wind farm in the world. Shepherds Flat is currently under construction near windy Arlington, Ore., and when completed in 2012 will produce 845 MW of energy. That’s a lot of wind—enough to power more than 235,000 homes.

This project is exciting to us not only because of its size and scale, but also because it uses advanced technology. This will be the first commercial wind farm in the U.S. to deploy, at scale, turbines that use permanent magnet generators—tech-speak for evolutionary turbine technology that will improve efficiency, reliability and grid connection capabilities. Though the technology has been installed outside the U.S., it’s an important, incremental step in lowering the cost of wind energy over the long term in the U.S.

Shepherds Flat will help Oregon continue to be one of the top wind producing states in the nation, while providing significant direct economic benefits to the state. The project will also benefit the region by helping California meet its aggressive renewable energy goals with a cost-effective and clean wind resource. The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long term agreements to Southern California Edison.

The Shepherds Flat Wind Farm under construction with me in the center and my colleagues Arielle Bertman and Matthew Stepka.

We look forward to joining a project with strong experienced partners such as the developer, Caithness Energy, and GE, which is an early investor in Shepherds Flat as well as the turbine manufacturer and operations and maintenance supplier. Our co-investors are Sumitomo Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, and Tyr Energy, a subsidiary of ITOCHU Corporation, both of which have deep experience in power projects.

This project brings our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million, including our most recent investments in a German solar photovoltaic plant and in the BrightSource Ivanpah solar power tower—the largest solar energy project in the world. We’re excited about helping deliver clean energy to the grid and we hope this latest investment encourages other companies to think about ways they can help accelerate the deployment of more renewable energy. We remain on the lookout for more projects that make business sense and will help all of us take advantage of clean, renewable energy.

Posted by Rick Needham, Director of Green Business Operations

Happy Tax Day! Now, where did your tax dollars go?

Like it or not, Americans have a date with the IRS today. In a few hours, our tax forms will have been sent in... yet most of us will still be left wondering, “How will the government spend our money?”

In February, we launched the Data Viz Challenge to answer that very question. The challenge was a five-week competition that asked developers to visualize how our federal income tax dollars are spent. We received more than 40 thought-provoking entries that each take a unique approach to making this data more accessible to taxpayers.

Take a look at the variety of visualizations in this short video:



The entries ranged from quirky and fun to serious and academic. Some were as simple as a receipt, others showed us how many minutes or days we work to cover public spending. One even rendered the data as a cityscape and invited people to climb the towers virtually.

In the end, our jury selected Anil Kandangath’s “Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?” as our Grand Prize winner. As the jury noted, his entry is information-rich but elegantly designed, and at no point while interacting with the visualization do you lose the “big picture.” Anil’s entry is a great example of how data visualization can take boring, complicated, but critically important information and make it accessible to everyone. Congratulations, Anil.

Thank you to all of the entrants and our partners Eyebeam and Whatwepayfor.com for making this possible. We hope these submissions help you better understand where your tax dollars are spent—and even inject a little bit of fun into your tax day this year. Happy filing!

Posted by Jenny Ramaswamy, Google Creative Lab

The taxman searcheth

While he may not have been the first to say it, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in 1789: “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

It’s tough to argue with Ben’s point, but as it turns out, a spike in searches around the two most significant events of tax season in the U.S.—the availability of W-2 forms and the due-date for federal tax returns—are pretty dependable as well, as search volume increases in January/beginning of February and in early April. Like other years, users have been looking for info on the process, places to turn for help, and service providers to get their taxes done. As expected, in the “Accounting & Tax” category, the fastest rising searches since mid-January include both commercial terms like [TurboTax] and [H&R Block] and government-specific terms like [IRS forms] and [1040 instructions].

Americans looking to file their taxes in advance aren’t the only ones searching for information on the subject; the last-minute filers have been searching quite a bit as well. In recent weeks, as the deadline has approached, searches for terms like [tax extension] have shot up. Elsewhere, tax filers from around the country are increasingly looking for ways to complete their taxes online in 2011. This year, searchers in North Carolina are leading the way in [do taxes online] followed by Missouri, and Pennsylvania.

During tax season, professional accountants aren’t the only ones that get consumed with tax preparation. Proof that Americans get seriously tax-obsessed: in the last week, folks have been searching more for tax info than for that other seasonal fixation, [american idol].

But no matter how consistent tax-related queries tend to be, the 2011 calendar features a wrinkle: in observance of Emancipation Day on April 15, the IRS has extended the deadline for federal returns to Monday, April 18. If you thought you were the only one who didn’t know that, you’re not alone: The deadline change has prompted quite a bit of action for [when is tax day].

Of course, taxpayers have been keenly interested in how they can save on taxes. For example, [American Opportunity Credit] searches have increased substantially from last year. More creatively, some Americans are looking to maximize their refund by documenting their financial activities of the past year. For some, that means looking at the monies that they *gave away* in one way or another. When it comes to taxes, perhaps vices trump good. Case in point: Like in past years, searches for [gambling losses] are currently besting those for [charity deductions].

For a view into what truly enterprising taxpayers have managed to claim in past years, see this list of deductions that have been actually been approved. Do you think we might be able to claim a deduction for our lava lamps?

Posted by Sam Sebastian, Industry Director Local, B2B and Government and Reggie Riley, Head of Industry, Financial Services

Google Apps highlights – 4/15/2011

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

In the last few weeks we’ve improved Google Apps with easier email snafu avoidance, better document and spreadsheet printing, stronger business security features for Android and more. The pace of entire organizations switching to Google Apps also continued to build, and many have shared their stories about moving to the cloud.

Recipient suggestion features graduate from Gmail Labs
We’ve all made the embarrassing mistake of forgetting to add an important email recipient, or even worse, sending an email to the wrong person with a similar name as someone else. To help you avoid such a digital faux pas, we experimented with Gmail Labs features that could notify you while drafting a message if it appeared you had addressed your message incorrectly. We heard lots of positive feedback about these Labs, so on Wednesday we rolled out recipient suggestion features for all Gmail users. Keep an eye out for the tips that show up beneath the address box!

Pagination and better printing for documents
Google Docs speeds up collaboration right in the browser between classmates and colleagues, but people often want to see how documents will look on paper before actually printing. On Tuesday we advanced Google Docs another notch by adding pagination—the ability to see where page breaks fall. We also made document printing a whole lot better on Chrome. Printing is now a simpler operation right from the browser’s “File” menu, and what you see in your browser is exactly what you’ll get on paper.

Improvements to spreadsheet printing, too
As of Monday, you can now print spreadsheets from your mobile phone with Cloud Print, building on the mobile document and email printing capabilities we announced earlier this year. You can print from most mobile browsers that support HTML5 to any cloud-connected printer. We also made improvements to spreadsheet printing from desktop browsers, with new options for printing spreadsheet titles, sheet names and page numbers.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office interface improvements
If your school or business wants some of Google Docs’ collaboration magic in familiar Microsoft Office software without upgrading Office or deploying SharePoint®, then we think you’ll like Google Cloud Connect. People can work together on the same files at the same time in Word, PowerPoint® and Excel® without the agony of attachments. We recently added 38 new language interfaces and a top feature request: the ability to minimize the Google Cloud Connect toolbar.

Better Android security and productivity for businesses
Last week we treated our business and education customers to three new Android features: storage encryption for Android 3.0+ devices, a streamlined contacts experience that makes it faster to find and connect with people in your organization and the ability for users to locate and secure lost or stolen Android 2.2+ devices without burdening IT administrators.

Who's gone Google?
Since our last update here, over 60,000 businesses have moved to Google Apps. We’ve profiled quite a few on the Google Enterprise Blog recently, including Boxx Group, South Carolina REALTORS, Just Salad, 3Tailer, and our favorite switch story of all, Contoso.

Thousands of schools, nonprofits and other organizations made the move as well. Welcome to Boise State University, Edina Public Schools, ESSEC Business School, Monash University, Oakwood Junior School, the Georgia Department of Corrections and The Phoenix of New Orleans.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager