Google increases Maximum attachment size to 25 MB

Now you can send bigger attachments in Gmail, as Google increased the maximum attachment size from 20 MB to 25 MB.

"With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size. Please note that you may not be able to send larger attachments to contacts who use other email services with smaller attachment limits. If your attachment bounces, you should invite them to Gmail, suggests Google.

For some reason, Gmail's Flash uploader doesn't allow me to upload files that are larger than 10 MB. The error message is "attachment failed" and Google's suggestions aren't very helpful. Switching to the basic uploader in the settings solves the problem, but it's more tedious to upload multiple files.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

Michael Jacksons Death slows down Google

The all powerful Google and their impenetrable server farms took a major hit last night, when the news about Michael Jackson suffering a cardiac arrest and ultimately passing away broke. As CNN and News.com shows, Google was displaying one of those Google "We're Sorry" pages to searches trying desperately to find out the fate of Michael Jackson. Even Search Engine Land was suffering from the news, as the tweet confirms.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020291.html

Tips for Making Website run faster

Installing a fast browser is not always enough to have a good experience when you browse the web: many web pages aren't optimized for performance. To help webmasters improve their sites, Google launched a new section as part of Google Code:

Let's make the web faster" which includes useful articles, videos and downloadable tools.You'll learn how to optimize CSS declarations, how to optimize JavaScript code and avoid memory leaks, how to use the best image format and prefetch resources.

Google also released a Firebug plug-in for Firefox that evaluates web pages and provides suggestions to improve them.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

Google Unveils AdSense For iPhone, Android Apps

Google (GOOG) today announced AdSense for Mobile Applications, a service that allows developers to display text and image ads in applications for the Apple iPhone and Google Android operating systems.

Google says it has been testing the system with a small number of partners for the base few months, and is not ready to open up the beta to a larger number of developers.

“In order to continue growing the mobile application market, developers need to make money to fund their projects,” Google said in a statement. “We hope AdSense for Mobile Applications will encourage iPhone and Android developers to keep making new, innovative mobile applications.”

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/06/24/google-unveils-adsense-for-iphone-android-apps/

New options for translating webpages

Google Translation service has more options when you translate web pages. You can now set a different destination language and translate a new web page by entering its address in the persistent input box. There's also a new interface that displays the translation in tooltips, so you can still read the original text.

Bing Translator Microsoft's translation service, has an interesting option that shows the original page and the translation side by side, much like in Google Translator Toolkit. This interface is very useful for those who are familiar with multiple languages and Google should add it as an option.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

Google sensors china porn searches

Google engineers have put in place several measures to remove pornography from search results in China, after the government warned the company its filter was too weak.

Google has temporarily disabled the Google Suggest feature on Google.cn and developed an automated system to remove pornographic links from search results, said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and the user experience, at a meeting in Taipei.

The company has also redesigned the Google.cn home page to remove the radio buttons that offer language and locale options, Google said in a statement. The rest of the home page remains the same.

"Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there," the statement says. "This has been a major engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the government."

China last week ordered Google to suspend its foreign Web site search service over the issue.

One search user in Beijing said the measures had made finding porn much more difficult via Google.cn, mainly from obvious search words such as "porn." However, he could still find some obscene material when searching in English and using slang or other less common words. Pornographic Bittorrent download links were also still available through the results.

Google's main English search page at Google.com continued to offer pornographic search results in China.

China's warning to Google last week comes amid a broad crackdown against online smut in the nation that has seen the shutting of thousands of Web sites and the creation of controversial censoring software, Green Dam Youth Escort, that blocks pornographic and politically sensitive content, and is to be installed on all computers sold in China as of the beginning of July.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167164/google_censors_china_porn_searches.html

Google updates maps for Android

Google has launched an updated version of its Maps application for Android smartphones, bringing a number of interesting new features, most importantly voice search.

So, if you’re an English-language speaker with an American, Australian, or British accent, you can now search Google Maps using your voice; how useful that really is, we’ll leave to individual users to decide, but talking into your phone on a crowded street will probably get you nowhere.

There’s a host of other improvements, though. First, Google has added transit and walking directions for over 250 cities, including New York City and San Francisco. A bug that caused background location updates to periodically stop in Google Latitude has been fixed, as long as you have the “Detect your location” option selected in the Latitude privacy menu.

Finally, there’s an interesting experimental feature called Updates which lets you communicate with friends. Start Latitude, click the “Updates” tab, and post messages to your friends. This feature will only work for users who have the latest version of Google Maps for Android.

Bear in mind that this update won’t be automatically downloaded to your phone; you have to download the new version in the Android market.

http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/google-updates-maps-for-android/

Citizentube: Watching video change our world

As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a new technology platform for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?

These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.

Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose '08 platform and the CNN/YouTube Debates in 2007. Since then we've expanded our programming to the fields of government, activism, and news & information. On the blog, we'll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what's happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/citizentube-watching-video-change-our.html

Google improves Flash search and indexing

Google has enhanced its search engine's capacity to index Adobe's Flash files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders.

Google's search engine can now index external content that a Flash file loads, such as text, HTML, XML or Flash content itself, the company said Friday.

The Google search engine will also tie the indexed Flash file to this externally loaded content and the documents from where it comes, Google said.

"This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users' queries," wrote Google software engineer Janis Stipins in an official blog.

Friday's announcement is the latest in Google's multiyear effort to improve its indexing of Flash files and specifically builds on the announcement in June of last year that Google had developed a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files.

At the time, Adobe also announced it was providing optimized Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help with their ongoing efforts to better index Flash files.

Improvements to index Flash by Google, Yahoo and others benefit not only the search engines and their end users but also webmasters and designers, who have struggled to have the Flash portions of their sites indexed and made searchable.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/308268/google_improves_flash_search_indexing

References:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Flash indexing with external resource loading

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl Flash

Adobe - Adobe Press Room

Google Street View Bike Does Santa Monica, Universities & More

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Remember that Google Street View bike that was unveiled in May for use to map footpaths in Britain? Turns out, Google has a number of them, and they’re also operating in Japan, Italy and the US. In fact, imagery from them from three spots in California has recently gone online and more will be coming in the next few months.

In the US, these areas have gotten Street View photography via bike power:

Santa Monica Pier

Monterey Bay Coastal Bike Path

3rd Street Promenade

http://searchengineland.com/google-street-view-bike-21320

Movie Trailers on Youtube

YouTube has launched a new directory for movie trailers. While YouTube has had movie trailers on its site from distributors in the past, Google’s video-sharing site has launched a new channel where official trailers are organized by “Latest,” “Popular,” “In Theatres,” and “Opening Soon.”

Apple’s movie trailer platform has long been the most comprehensive and popular site in distributing online trailers. Hulu also provides a good amount of trailers on its site. Recently, YouTube launched a premium section with movies and TV shows from Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, the BBC, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, and National Geographic.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/youtube-plays-nice-with-the-movie-industry-puts-trailers-in-their-own-channel/

Import Word 2007 files to Google Docs

Click the Upload button at the top of the sidebar in your Docs list page.

Click Browse.

To upload a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, follow these steps:

Select the document, spreadsheet, or presentation you'd like to open.

Click Open.

Click Upload File. The uploaded file appears in your Docs list.

When uploading, please keep the following in mind:

You can only upload certain file types:

For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tsb

For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf

For presentations: .ppt, .pps

You can also upload .pdf files to your Docs list.

Emailing documents in to Google Docs

If you'd prefer, you can email your documents in to Google Docs. This is a quick way to import many documents at once, and you can use this feature as an add-on to how you currently collaborate with others. For example, you can add your unique Email-In address when you pass around documents.

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50092&hl=en

There are some file-size limits. See the size requirements for uploading.

Some of your original formatting may not be preserved.