Google Data

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Product Manager, Google Maps APIIn April 2010, 89 million U.S. households returned a census form in which they answered ten basic questions. Once collected, aggregated, and published, the 2010 U.S. census provided rich insights…

Join us for a webinar series beginning this month that will focus on offering tips and tools for everything from Creatives to Floodlight. Visit the DFA Help Center to register for any webinars as well as our classroom offerings.Classroom TrainingDFA Fu…

Almost 4 years after launch, we’ve seen fantastic growth both in Google App Engine and the apps that run on it. And although the Master/Slave Datastore was a big part of our early success, it’s time to announce the deprecation of the Master/Slave Da…

What does creativity look like in a digital context? What does it mean for your business, your campaigns, and your customers? This issue of Google’s Think Quarterly explores these fundamental questions and more — a must read for digital marketers! A…

Hello Orkut Users!

If you use the old version of Orkut, you’ve noticed that some pages look different today. Your interface may be much cleaner and simpler. You may have noticed you have more options for personalization. You also may notice that moving around your profile may be much faster. That’s because starting today and over the next few months, we will begin rolling out the new version of the platform to all Orkut users.

You’ll remember that about 3 years ago, we announced that we were testing a new version of Orkut that would be faster and easier to use. We also gave you the option of choosing whether to stay with the version of Orkut that you were familiar with, or to move on to the adventure of the latest platform. Since then, we’ve continued to experiment and update Orkut based on your feedback so that we could offer the best experience possible. And you responded. Now most of you are using the newest version of Orkut, and over the next few months everyone will be using the new platform.

We realize that for some of you, this will take getting used to. However, we want to be able to offer everyone access to some of the exciting things we’re working on and will be bringing to Orkut in the future, at the same time. We look forward to your feedback! It will help us continue to make Orkut a place where you feel comfortable sharing with your friends and experiencing the best Google has to offer. If you have any questions or comments, find us on our Official Orkut Community! We look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Hermes de Freitas, Bárbara Veloso, and Natália Duarte, Orkut team

We held our fifth Google Summer of Code meetup in the Moratuwa, Sri Lanka area on March 17th. We had enormous support from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering staff at the University of Moratuwa to make it a full scale session covering…

If you’re audience targeting (or considering it), customizing your ads for your audience can yield better performance. Here are the top tips for audience targeted creatives learned through the collective experience of hundreds of Google AdWords accou…

With a background in database and computer science, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization, Kooshiar Azimian is a self-described wearer of many hats. In early 2011, he channeled his diverse expertise to create Concertboom, a comprehensive c…

Posted by Daniel Schramm, Associate Product Manager Intern, Google Maps APIEvery day people rely on maps to help them make purchasing decisions. Location matters for everything from choosing a restaurant for dinner, to picking the perfect home. It’s …

Another month and another batch of improvements to Google Docs. We recently debuted a new spell checker that gets smarter and grows with the web, and we’ve also turned on a few features that let you do more with Docs.

New charting options 
We’ve added a bunch of new ways to make richer charts in Google spreadsheets. You can now control the opacity of an area chart, set fonts to be bold or italic, and label sections of your charts along the axis.

These new features bring the number of charting improvements up to 30 since the beginning of the year, which is about 1 new feature every 3 days. Some of our favorite charts updates include annotations, error bars, a second Y axis, donut charts, and loads of formatting options.

OCR and spreadsheets support more languages
With Google Docs, you can upload PDFs and images of scanned text and have them automatically converted into Google documents using our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Starting this week, this is available in four new languages: Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese Traditional, and Cherokee.

Language support got better in Google spreadsheets too. For Hebrew and Arabic speakers, sheets and cells now offer right-to-left support.

More ways to use Google Apps Script 
Google Apps Script is a way for developers to customize Google Docs and other Google products. Over the past month, we’ve made some changes which developers may find helpful, including:

• Support for adding your own HTML to your script’s dialogues and pages. Let’s say you wrote a script that prompts collaborators to play a game when they open a certain spreadsheet. It’s now possible to include more sophisticated HTML, like a table in the dialog that you built. 

• The option to programmatically set sheet protection in Apps Script. If you’re a teacher, you could add a script that automatically looked at all your spreadsheets and made sure that you’re the only one allowed to edit any sheet named “Grades”. 
• A redesign to the Apps Script menus. Sometimes when you’re starting a new project you’ll want to use scripts that you’ve already created. The menu changes make it easier for you to reuse scripts that you’ve already built and to share your scripts with other people . 

Posted by Michael Schidlowsky, Software Engineer

The Building Opportunities for Leadership & Development (BOLD) Diversity Immersion Program for Freshmen is designed to provide exposure into the technology industry for students who are historically under-represented in this field. Google invites c…

After testing Google Affiliate Network in beta throughout the UK, we’re excited to announce that we’re expanding to more UK advertisers and agencies. This means more relevant deals and promotions will be available to publishers with UK audiences. W…

[This post is by Nadav Aharony, a product manager on the Android team — Tim Bray]We’re rolling out new developer features for the Gmail Android app: It now includes a public ContentProvider that you can use to retrieve label data. Yo…