• speed – GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.

• Google quality and ranking – GCS analyzes every item in our index using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.

• parametric search and sorting – GCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.

• product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.

• spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.

• fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.

• Submit all recommended and optional attributes, wherever they're relevant: the more information shoppers have, the more they know about the products you offer. For example, make sure you're submitting the UPC, Brand, and Product Type attributes.

• Use the Google Local Business Center to send us your local store locations: Google Product Search is now showing local store locations in our search results, so make sure to send us this data. Also, if you have local stores, include the "online only" attribute for any items you only stock online.

• Send us the largest and highest-quality images you have. We're planning on experimenting with displays that use large images; products that have big, high-quality images will stand out. Please send us images that are at least 300 x 300 pixels, without resizing them.

• As the pace of shopping speeds up for the holidays, it's important to make sure you're submitting often enough to keep your listings fresh and accurate for stock status and pricing.

• Use Google Analytics or your favorite web analytics program to track your traffic.

• Gadgets can be made to be private to a specific domain.
• Gadgets will match the security and encryption level of the site.
• There is a new start page template that lets each user personalize the gadgets that are display specifically for them.

• Daily subscriber totals (in green)


• Daily reach totals (in blue)


• The relationship between these two numbers over time

• Understanding that reach means people taking action by viewing or clicking on items in your feed helps you understand how engaged your audience is.
  
  
• The more often you post (especially with full text), the more often people are likely to view your current (and previous) updates, and even click-through to your site for related information.


• Note the blue spikes in reach above; these are centered around new posts. Steady subscriber growth occurred as this site promoted and redirected 100% of its original feed traffic to its feed.

• Added reliability and delivery scale, thanks to Google infrastructure. The same systems that handle Gmail and other, large-scale public email communications traffic now deliver FeedBurner email subscriptions, too.
  


• Robust subscriber list search and pagination. Instead of loading your entire subscriber list, which is too much for some browsers to handle if that list is really big, the new service displays just the 150 most recent subscribers. You can search for specific addresses or general domains (e.g., "hotmail.com" will return a list and total count of your subscribers with "hotmail.com" in their addresses.) This list is now paginated to allow you to scroll through its contents easily.
  


• Complete subscriber list export. Want to view the whole shebang offline? Download a CSV-formatted text file of your entire subscriber list.

• Customize delivery time frame and time zone
• Write your own welcome/activation email text
• Choose from multiple custom font, size, and color combinations
  
• Incorporate a custom graphic logo in your HTML message header
  

Map a site to a specific URL

The standard URL of a site in Google Apps currently looks like http://sites.google.com/a/example.com/site-name, but now you can let users access your site at a URL on your domain that is easier to remember. The new location can be your domain home page or any sub-domain in your domain (e.g. http://www.example.com, http://info.example.com, http://wiki.example.com, etc.), and can be set up on the “Web Addresses” tab of the Sites service settings in your Google Apps control panel.

Change the root URL for all sites

If you have several sites, you can also make them automatically accessible at a designated URL on your domain. For example, instead of being at http://sites.google.com/a/example.com/site-name, the administrator can make them available at http://sites.example.com/site-name or at any other sub-domain.

Remember these new features are currently only available for public sites in Google Apps (mapped URLs to private sites will redirect to the standard URL). Stay tuned for more exciting domain mapping news for private sites and sites created under http://sites.google.com/site.

For more details on this topic and specific setup instructions, see our online help center.

While writing this post I learned about RFC 2606, which designates example.com as a domain that can be used for, well, examples. Doesn't that make a lot of sense? I sure thought so.

Posted by Di Wang, Software Engineer

During a recent mother's day trip I realized how valuable Google Sites could be for parents and families, so as part of our latest launch I decided to create a couple of new example websites: a family site and a playgroup site.

Family website

Many families, like mine, are scattered across the US or even the world. Our family used to rely mostly on email to keep in touch and send out photos (pleases grandma, scale the photos down before sending them). Now we use Google Sites as a single place for sharing family events (never miss another birthday!), photos, recipes and news. Here are some things I like most:

• Calendar – Anyone can see and add birthdays, graduations, upcoming trips and more. It is easy, so I am no longer a bottleneck for keeping everyone updated.
• Photos – We are always snapping photos when we are out, and it is fun to share slideshows of these by embedding Picasa Web Albums in our website.
• Recipes – Using the “list” page type, I put all our family recipes in one place, so I can quickly search for any recipe. Now I don’t have to look all over the place for family favorites (like my mom's famous Chicken Lasagna).
  

Play group website

When I became a mom my social life expanded to include other parents who had children of similar ages. Having had more than a few frustrating experiences organizing events via email, I decided to set up a play group website on Google Sites. It is very convenient that anyone in our group can add an event, upload photos of our past play dates, and update important information about their child (allergies, favorite foods, adorable videos). Here is some of the cool stuff about the play group site:

• Home – The hub of all the action, the home page gives a quick overview of upcoming events, general announcements, a slideshow of our last activity (Swimming!), and some other fun gadgets (like top selling baby items).
  
• Players! – All the members are listed in one place, and all the kids have their own detailed pages that parents can customize as they like.
  
• Toddler friendly places – Combining a Google spreadsheet form with a Google maps gadget, the group can add and see good places for little kids.

These example websites were easy to set up (just added content), and they show just a couple of the many possibilities for a wide variety of groups and clubs to make their own sites on Google Sites.

Posted by Mandy Sladden, Lead Designer