Tag Archives: japanese

Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

Posted on by
Reply

For many, the start of a new year is also the start of a new semester. Whether you’re a current student trying to familiarize yourself with campus, an applicant assessing your options or an alumnus feeling nostalgic, the Street View feature in Google Maps can be your tour guide without the backward walking. We recently added imagery of more university campuses to the existing special collections already available via Street View through our Partner Program . Let’s take a quick tour of some of the many beautiful campuses around the world. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward, you can find Waseda University . Founded in 1882, it is known for producing some of the top Japanese politicians and business leaders in recent history. Check out the statue of Ōkuma Shigenobu , who founded the university. View Larger Map Halfway around the world, we can visit the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Founded in 1451, this university is one of the oldest in the world , and the fourth oldest in the English speaking world. Take a tour of the magnificent campus starting at the West Quadrangle of the Main Building. View Larger Map Hop the Atlantic and cross the U.S. to Stanford University , which was founded in 1891 in Palo Alto, Calif. Located near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, both of our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, attended Stanford for their graduate studies. Explore the campus starting at the palm-lined main quad with a view of Hoover Tower. View Larger Map Students, take note: Even though your campus is now available in your browser, you still need to go to class! To view other imagery collections of popular universities around the world see a complete list of the campuses or visit a few more highlights in the Street View gallery . Posted by Chris Fiock, Program Manager for Street View

Read the original here:
Street View: your friendly campus tour guide

This week in search 4/29/11

Posted on by
Reply

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label ” This week in search ” and subscribe to the series. – Ed. This week, you can find what you’re searching for a little faster, whether it’s a recipe, the time of the royal wedding or a local prayer time. More relevant predictions in Recipe View In the past, when you searched in Recipe View on Google, you’d see the same search predictions that you’d see on the main web results page, which wasn’t always helpful for specifically food-related searches. Now when you search in Recipe View, you’ll see more relevant search predictions. For example, typing [c] will give you predictions for [chicken] or [cake] versus [craigslist] or [cnn], and typing [co] will predict [cookies] or [coconut]—and maybe inspire you to make coconut cookies. This feature is currently available in English, with more languages and local delicacies to follow. Rich snippets for prayer times Rich snippets are the brief descriptions you see beneath search results that summarize what’s on a webpage and provide you with more information before you click on a site link. For example, if you search for [ events ], you’ll see a list of upcoming local events on the results page. Now, in addition to rich snippets for events , reviews and people , you can find local prayer times quicker and easier in your results. For example, a search for Islamic prayer times in London will show prayer times and locations. As more sites around the world use rich snippets for prayer times, you’ll start seeing results for additional cities. The technology is open for use by religious organizations from any faith, and is particularly useful for Islamic prayer times, which are measured according to the movement of the sun. If you have a site with prayer times, you can update your site using the rich snippets format specified in Google Webmaster Central . Google Instant in Japan Searchers in Japan will now be able to see search predictions and results appear as they type. Google Instant will be available for everyone in Japan over the next few days, as well as for those typing in Japanese on other domains that currently support Google Instant. Time for the royal wedding The highly anticipated royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton had many people setting their alarm clocks to watch the live broadcast from Britain—which meant figuring out exactly what time the ceremony would be in your local time zone. To make it easier to tune in at the right hour, searches related to the royal wedding displayed a box at the top of the results page with the time of the wedding in your local time zone; this info was available in 23 languages. Congratulations to the happy couple! As we head into the weekend, don’t forget to try solving today’s A Google a Day question at www.agoogleaday.com : Posted by Ben Gomes, Google Fellow

View post:
This week in search 4/29/11

Assembling resources following the earthquake in Japan

Posted on by
Reply

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog ) I was the in the middle of writing code when the Google Japan office, on the 26th floor of Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, started shaking slowly. The rocking gradually increased, and I looked out the window to see the surrounding buildings all swaying ominously. Although alerts from the building urged us to evacuate via the emergency stairs, I couldn’t help but stay and search for information about the earthquake’s epicenter and scale. Amidst a series of aftershocks rocking our office, a small group of us in Tokyo and several other Google offices started gathering information about the earthquake to create the Crisis Response information page . As someone who experienced the Kobe earthquake 16 years ago when I was at university, I cannot forget the immediate desire for information. There was no way to find out where my family and friends were, if transportation would be available to get us home, and most importantly, whether we would be able to find shelter. This experience helped me remember that during a crisis, information about shelters can become increasingly muddled. Together with our Google Crisis Response team, we decided to organize existing public information from local governments about the concerned areas. Because of the very high volume of web traffic yesterday, this proved difficult to access. Collaborating with the Google Maps engineering team in Tokyo, we rapidly put together a page of information on Google Maps for our Crisis Response page. And thanks to our colleagues in California and around the globe, within one hour of the earthquake we launched Google Person Finder , a tool to help locate missing people, in Japanese, Chinese and English. We published sites in Japanese and English with maps, news updates, videos and resources. We also posted tsunami alerts on the Google homepage for appropriate domains to make sure as many people as possible saw the warning. And in addition to these tools we’ve made available, we are donating $250,000 to organizations in Japan who are working on relief and recovery efforts. Our hearts go out to those who have been affected by the tragedy, and we thank the citizens, first responders and organizations working hard to keep everyone safe. Posted by Ken Miura on behalf of Google Japan and international Crisis Response teams

See more here:
Assembling resources following the earthquake in Japan

你好, नमस्ते and bonjour to better mobile web Gmail

Posted on by
Reply

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog ) There are many ways to get your Gmail on your phone. The mobile webapp version of Gmail (which you can get to by going to gmail.com in your browser) is the best way to get the most Gmail features on your iPhone or Android-powered device. Features such as search, stars, labels and threaded conversations all work in the mobile webapp just as they do in the desktop Gmail experience. Today, we’re bringing the latest version of our HTML5 webapp to 44 new languages. Before today, this new version was only available for U.S. English, but we’re now expanding to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and American), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (for both Spain and South America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu and Vietnamese. If your phone’s default language is one of those listed, go to gmail.com in your phone’s browser and the new interface will appear in your language automatically. We’ve been rolling these changes out, so some of you may have already seen them. You’ll get a bunch of new goodies including offline support, smart links (titles will appear in links for Google Maps, YouTube and Google Docs), the ability to add and remove labels, layout improvements and more—in addition to the existing features like starring, better threaded conversations and search. This new version works for iPhones running iOS 2.2.1 and above, and all versions of Android. Go to gmail.com in the browser of your iPhone or Android-powered device to try it out, and if you have any feedback, let us know in our forum . Posted by Scott Eblen, Product Manager

Follow this link:
你好, नमस्ते and bonjour to better mobile web Gmail

Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism

Posted on by
Reply

(Cross-posted on the Google LatLong Blog ) Today we’re introducing the latest version of Google Earth , our interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools. In Google Earth 6 , we’re taking realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We’ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery. Over the next several days on our LatLong blog , we’ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite. Integrated Street View When Google Earth was first introduced, people were wowed by the ability to virtually fly from outer space right down to the roof of their house. While flying over rooftops gives you a super-human view of our world, the ground level is where we experience our daily lives. We took our first baby steps toward bringing the Google Earth experience to street level with our implementation of Street View in Google Earth in 2008, which enabled flying into Street View panoramas. In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight. Now, you’ll notice that Pegman is docked right alongside the navigation controls—an ever-present travel companion ready whenever you want to get your feet on the street and take a virtual walk around. Just pick up Pegman and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road to fly right down to the ground. Once there, you can use the navigation controls or your mouse to look around. And unlike our earlier Street View layer, you can now move seamlessly from one location to another as if you’re walking down the street by using the scroll-wheel on your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to visit somewhere farther away, simply click the “exit” button and you’ll immediately return to an aerial view where you can easily fly to your next destination. Drag and drop Pegman to enter Street View. The blue lines indicate where Street View imagery is available. 3D trees I think we can all agree that our planet without trees would be a pretty desolate place. Besides the ever-important task of providing us with the oxygen we breathe, trees are an integral part of the landscape around us. In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by. All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees , from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree. While we’ve just gotten started planting trees in Google Earth, we already have more than 80 million trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through our Google Earth Outreach program, we’ve also been working with organizations including the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and CONABIO in Mexico to model our planet’s threatened forests. To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel. As a starting point, try a search for “Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.” Once you arrive at your destination, click the zoom slider. You’ll then be taken down to the ground where you can use our new ground-level navigation to walk among the trees. 3D trees in San Francisco, California Easy-to-use historical imagery One of the features people told us they liked best in Google Earth 5 was the availability of historical imagery , which enables you to visually go back in time to see such things as Warsaw in 1935 , London in 1945 , and Port-au-Prince Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. But it wasn’t always obvious when historical imagery was available for a particular place, making this feature one of Google Earth’s lesser-known gems. So with this new version, we’ve made it very easy to discover historical imagery . When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period. You can then browse through all the historical imagery available for that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view. The site of Google’s Mountain View campus in 1948 To download Google Earth 6, or to see videos of our newest features, visit http://earth.google.com . Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

Original post:
Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism

125 video shortlist announced today for YouTube Play

Posted on by
Reply

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog ) The Guggenheim has spoken: the shortlist for YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video is now going in front of the jury, and is available to view at youtube.com/play . It’s been a busy summer. More than 23,000 videos, from 91 countries across the world, were submitted for YouTube Play, and the Guggenheim has picked 125 to make up the shortlist. In there you’ll find submissions from students, video artists, photographers, filmmakers, composers, video game programmers, an American Women’s Chess Champion , a comedy improv group , a Swedish rock band, a South African hip-hop group , an Australian electronic music producer —and a lot more. It’s now down to the YouTube Play jury to pick up to 20 videos for a special presentation at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. Here is one of the jurors, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, to explain why he thinks YouTube is important in the art world today: The videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in the Tower 2 Gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at kiosks at the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, Berlin and Venice, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel. Posted by Tom Pursey, Product Marketing Manager

Link:
125 video shortlist announced today for YouTube Play

This week in search 8/27/10

Posted on by
Reply

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed. Searches come in many flavors, but it’s our job to determine what type of search you’re doing once you’ve clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you’re looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it’s that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements: Improved Blog Search With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you’ll often find great content on blogs—whether you’re planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you’re looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking “Blogs,” then “Homepages,” in the left-hand panel of your search results. Example searches: [ tesla car ], [ google ], [ android ] A new home for Realtime Search When we think about relevancy, often what you’re looking for may have just happened. It’s been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that’s happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services. Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. Example search: [ egg recall ] More local results in maps and clickable markers We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we’ll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District: When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the “Info” window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places. Example searches: [ fabric stores nyc ], [ coffee in seattle ], [ resort near ko samui, thailand ] We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks. Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

See more here:
This week in search 8/27/10

Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

Posted on by
Reply

When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime . On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are. In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed. Finally, we’ve also added updates content to Google Alerts, making it easy to stay informed about a topic of your choosing. Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter or other short-form services. Or, if you want to manage your email volume, you can set alerts to email you once per day or week. Check out our demo video of the new features and quick tips on how to use them: You can access Realtime Search by typing www.google.com/realtime directly into your browser, or clicking the “Updates” link in the left-hand panel of your search results. Set up your Google Alerts at www.google.com/alerts . Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. The features are rolling out now, but you can use this link to see them right away. Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Read the original post:
Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

This week in search 2/28/10

Posted on by
Reply

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed. This week, we had a number of exciting announcements: Refine your searches by location Location can tremendously aid the way you search, so we were pleased to add the ability to refine your searches by location to the Search Options panel . Say you’re big on the outdoors and want to find bike rental information, bicycling blogs or the closest sporting goods store. There’s a good chance you’re looking for information that’s relevant to your region, city or even a city you’re visiting on vacation. That’s where this tool can help. One of the really useful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding a city name (e.g., “Berkeley”) to your query and missing webpages that are in a similar region (e.g., “East Bay”, “Oakland”) but might not specifically mention the city in your search. Example search: [ bike stores ] – Click on “Show options” to adjust the location. You can narrow the location down to near you, the city you’re in, the region or state. You can also select “Custom Location” and enter it directly. Fetch as Googlebot Mobile added to Webmaster Tools Labs Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs , and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we’re happy to introduce an additional Labs feature to our line-up: the ability to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile. This was a common request from users with mobile-specific sites, and we thought it was a great idea. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites) and XHTML/WML. We’re excited to bring you this feature based on your feedback, and we look forward to launching more of them in future. Let us know what you think ! Facebook in real-time search Starting this week we added Facebook content to real-time search in the U.S. Real-time search, which we launched in December, helps you tap into the most relevant, freshest search results on the web, many of which are just seconds old. With this latest addition, you can access the news, photos and blog posts that Facebook fan pages publish to the world. You can find the Facebook Pages updates in our real-time mode by clicking on “Show Options” and then “Latest” or “Updates.” Example search: [ facebook ] Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more next week! Posted by Gabriel Stricker, Director, Global Communications & Public Affairs

See more here:
This week in search 2/28/10