We hope all of our Google friends had a great October. Here's the
month's update on our products and services.
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POWER TIP
Better music information in search results
We have just introduced a new feature to help you better find music
information using Google search. Now, when you enter a music-related
query — like the name of a song, artist, album or a line or two of
lyrics — into the Google search box, your search results will include
links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search
partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. This feature not
only makes search better, it also introduces millions of music seekers
to new sources of licensed music online.
http://www.google.com
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NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES
Google Flu Trends
Google Flu Trends has expanded from four to 20 countries, including
much of Europe. It's also now available in 38 languages. By tracking
the popularity of certain flu-related Google search queries, we are
able to estimate how many people actually have flu symptoms in a given
location, in near real-time. While some traditional flu surveillance
systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google
search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides
an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials
and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the
flu season.
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Introducing Google Building Maker
Here is a fun and simple online tool for creating 3D buildings in
Google Earth, called Google Building Maker. This tool makes it
possible for anyone with a web browser to make high-quality, photo-
textured 3D models. It works like a very large, and very smart,
collection of building blocks: By assembling the blocks to match the
shape of your favorite building, you can make a whole 3D building in a
few minutes. Building Maker is available for 50 cities and in 14
languages.
http://www.google.com/buildingmaker
Google Wave opens up invitations to a limited preview
We've started sending invitations to preview Google Wave, a new tool
that lets you communicate and collaborate in real time, to 100,000+
users. Developers working with Wave now have some new extensions and a
roadmap for our APIs. Finally, based on early responses from Google
Apps customers, we have also invited to a set of businesses and
schools to preview Wave, and look forward to their feedback on how
Wave might help with collaboration and productivity.
http://wave.google.com/
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/extensions.html
New security solutions in Google Pack
Google Pack now provides a free way for individual PCs to detect and
remove viruses, spyware and rootkits. PC Tools Spyware Doctor with
Anti-Virus SE is available in most locales while Avast! 5.0 Free
Antivirus will be used in major European locales. The new versions
significantly increase protection for Google Pack PC users and are
distributed for free.
http://pack.google.com
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MISCELLANY
Recently we began a weekly series on the Official Google Blog
reflecting the heart of our company: search. We're always making
changes to improve your search experience, so we have gathered
together the seemingly-small details of those changes in one easy-to-
find place. We cover a wide variety of aspects within search — tools
that webmasters can use to make their sites safer, our recent
agreement with Twitter for adding real-time search results and how
we've used our search technology to improve recommendations in Google
Reader. As we continue to work on improving the search experience, we
will keep you updated through this series and posts elsewhere.
http://bit.ly/2LPopW
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The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our
technology and products, and the company at large.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
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