Google Data

By Melina Mattos, Program Manager for Google Africa and Bob Aman, Program Manager for Developer Relations

Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog

Attention developers! Of the 90+ Google APIs, which is your favorite? We know that we fell in love with the Google+ API after we saw the amazing applications built from the Hackathons in South Africa and Kenya. We want to continue spreading the love!

This Valentine’s Day we’re thrilled to announce that we are holding three more Google+ Hackathons with the support of the Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs) in Accra, Kampala, and Lagos.

If you are ready to wow us with your application, please apply for the event using these forms: Kampala on March 10 at the 4th floor of Solis House, Lagos on March 17 at the CCHub Nigeria, and Accra on March 21 at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology.

Remember to start today on getting those creative juices flowing! Familiarize yourself with the API and review these resources. Begin gathering ideas and coding a little. Take advantage of the Google+ Platform Office Hours on the 15th of February. If you have any questions, please address them to us in our Google+ Hangout on February 23. Use the Hackathon to perfect your application and win one of the multiple prizes we will be awarding – including a ticket for the overall winning application to Google’s premiere developer event, Google I/O!

Any updates relating to these Hackathons and the Hangout will be posted on Google+ (of course!) using the hashtag #hackgplus. Stay tuned!

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Pete LePage, Developer Advocate

Yesterday, the Chrome Developer Relations team launched several new resources, including the Field Guide to Web Applications. It’s a new resource that is designed to help web developers create great web apps. We’ve heard loud and clear from users that they want more and better web apps, and we hope this new field guide will enable you to create those web apps. Our fictitious author Bert Appward guides you through topics like the properties of web applications, design fundamentals, tips for creating great experiences, and a few case studies that put best practices to use. Whether you’re building your first web app or are just looking for ways to improve your existing apps, I hope you’ll find the field guide useful.

We built the field guide to embody the principles and best practices that it preaches. We stepped away from the normal webpage look, and instead designed the experience around a field guide. We used many CSS3 features like box-shadow, opacity, multiple backgrounds and more to provide a rich, visual experience. To make sure that it worked offline, we used AppCache and other than some URL rewriting techniques, didn’t use any server-side code. We used the HTML5 History API to maintain page state even though everything is served from a single HTML page. We’ve started working on a new case study about the field guide, so check back soon for that!

Pete LePage is a Developer Advocate on the Google Chrome team and works with developers to create great web applications for the Chrome Web Store. He recently helped launch the +Chrome Developers page on Google+.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Analytics has a network of Certified Partners around the globe who provide valuable technical and analytical services, but I often get asked about the impact of their work. To that end, we help our partners publish case studies to showcase their…

Posted by Ariel Levine, Google eBooks Associate

This one day special is now over.
Forget the chocolate and flowers this Valentine’s Day. The rush of new brooding love can be all yours with our special offer on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight eBook. Seventeen-year-old Isabella “Bella” Swan moves to a new town in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula, and her life changes completely when she meets Edward Cullen, the most attractive guy at her high school. But Edward has a deep, supernatural secret, and his love, though pure and true, threatens her very existence. The angsty affection of Twilight spawned a whole new genre of paranormal romance when it was released and the series continues to lead the bestseller lists today. Treat yourself to this guilty pleasure with the first book in the series – Twilight, today for only $2.99. This offer is good for readers within the United States and Canada, through midnight EST today, 2/14/12.

Last year we added image results to Google Custom Search Engines to enable sites to offer image-only results that showcase photos and other digital images. For site owners who want more flexibility in presentation, they are also now available…

By Nam Nguyen, Software Engineer

Last year we added image results to Google Custom Search Engines to enable sites to offer image-only results that showcase photos and other digital images. For site owners who want more flexibility in presentation, they are also now available from the Custom Search API.

Read more about accessing Image Results from the Custom Search API or try it out in the Custom Search API Explorer. For billing purposes, image queries will be treated the same as web queries. If you are still using the deprecated Google Image Search API, now’s a great time to switch!

Below is an example of an image search to find small jpeg images of flowers:

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=YOUR_API_KEY&cx=YOUR_CSE_ID&q=flower&searchType=image&fileType=jpg&imgSize=small&alt=json

With a valid key and cse id, here is a possible json result returned for an image item:

{
   "kind": "customsearch#result",
   "title": "flower-photo",
   "htmlTitle": "\u003cb\u003eflower\u003c/b\u003e-photo",
   "link": "http://images.example.com/flowerphoto.jpg",
   "displayLink": "images.example.com",
   "snippet": "photo of flower",
   "htmlSnippet": "photo of \u003cb\u003eflower\u003c/b\u003e",
   "mime": "image/jpeg",
   "image": {
    "contextLink": "http://images.example.com/flowergallery.html",
    "height": 100,
    "width": 100,
    "byteSize": 6104,
    "thumbnailLink": "https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:3x4MPL3",
    "thumbnailHeight": 82,
    "thumbnailWidth": 82
   }
}

which you can use to render the image in your own site.

Note that you need to enable image search in your custom search engine control panel for the custom image search to work.

Nam Nguyen works on the JSON/Atom Custom Search API, which lets developers retrieve and display results from Google Custom Search programmatically. He is dedicated to making developers’ lives a little easier by providing a simple API.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

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Posted by Winter Casey, Senior Policy Analyst In the Stone Age, as humans struggled to survive and build, they traded for food and tools. In the Age of Discovery, as explorers traversed the seas, they traded spices. And now in the Information Age, as …

Cross-posted form the Open Source at Google BlogWe are delighted to announce the grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2011, a contest designed to introduce pre-university students (age 13-17) to the world of open source software development. Congratul…

We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone. Today, we’re no longer an experimental service. We’re the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day.D…

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