Google Commerce Search 2.0

Summer is here, and so is Google Commerce Search 2.0 School is out for the summer, and that means it's time for some swimsuit shopping, travel purchases and—before we know it—buying back-to-school supplies. To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, today we're launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. The new version of Google Commerce Search provides a better experience online for shoppers and greater control—with immediate ROI—for retailers. Google Commerce Search, first launched a little over six months ago, is an enterprise-grade website search solution hosted in Google's cloud and designed specifically for online retailers. This second release includes a number of improvements: More merchant customization: Today we're introducing a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves—no custom code necessary. New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly. Better shopper experience: With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. GCS is also faster and more relevant than before thanks to search quality improvements. Because it's hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. We've also added spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonym options to make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com. Improved browsing and navigation: Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they're looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products. Finally, we're making the benefits of Google Commerce Search 2.0 available to a wider range of retailers by introducing a pricing model that starts at $25,000/year. Get in touch with us to learn more. As more consumers turn to online channels to purchase and research products, it's important for your site to keep up with them using the best technology out there. So with summer just around the corner, make sure your sunscreen's on, your beach blanket is ready and your e-commerce site is optimized with Google Commerce Search. Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager

Edit video online with the YouTube Video Editor Posted: 16 Jun 2010 10:13 PM PDT With software installations and complicated instructions, editing video can be a hassle—but we think it should be easy. Today, we're introducing YouTube's new online video editor, which makes editing your video a cinch. It's available in TestTube, where YouTube engineers and developers test out new tools and get feedback on how they're doing. With this new editor, you can: Combine multiple videos you've uploaded to create a new longer video Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click—no upload necessary All that, and you don't need to install any extra software. Here's a video from YouTube user rewboss that gives you a glimpse of how it works: Check out the YouTube Blog for more details. And once you've given the editor a whirl, let us know what you think by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog. Posted by Rushabh Doshi, Software Engineer

Search is more fun when it's personalized

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. We work hard to consistently develop new tools, features and algorithmic changes to help us better understand what you mean when you enter a query into the Google search box—and we ultimately use that understanding to get you the information you're looking for as fast as possible. Understanding is core to our mission—particularly as we strive to be as useful in your everyday tasks. For example, if you search for a local sports team, and there's been a recent game, we'll show you scores. If you're visiting Boston and looking for a restaurant, you'll find tailored search suggestions based on the best Beantown spots. It's these features that enhance the experience of searching and help you find exactly what you're looking for. This week, we've made a few changes that we hope will make Google search even better for you. Spelling Corrections in Suggest Since we first launched Google Suggest, we've offered spell-corrected search completions to provide you with similar search queries from other users. With this feature, not only does Suggest help you rest your fingers because you don't have to type out a full query—you can also catch a mistake quickly and easily. An example of old spelling correction in Google Suggest This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you're typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a "Did you mean" suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search. These spelling suggestions already exist on the results page, but by moving them to an earlier point in the search process, we hope we've made it faster and easier to get to the results you're looking for. Right now, this feature is offered only for google.com in English, but we're working to roll this out internationally in the near future. Google Suggest with the new spelling corrections feature Mobile app results in mobile search With tens of thousands of apps available for both Android and iPhone phone, there are plenty of options to choose from when you're looking for new apps. And it makes sense that if you hear about a great new app while you're out and about, you'll want to download it then and there. In an effort to make apps even easier to find, this week we launched a new feature for mobile search that helps users on Android-powered devices and iPhones find and download mobile apps. So the next time you're looking for the latest action game, multimedia app or travel tool on your phone, we'll show you a special result at the top of your mobile search results showing basic information about the app you're looking for, including title, price and publisher. You'll also find a link that will take you directly to the app's installation page in the Android Market or Apple's App Store. Example mobile searches on your iPhone or Android device: [download pandora] or [bank of america app] A new look for the Google homepage Search is more fun when it's personalized. That's why I was delighted to announce our new feature that allows you to personalize your Google homepage with a favorite photo. Whether you choose a picture from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery of photos hosted by Picasa, Google is now yours to personalize. To get started, head to google.com and look for the "Change background image" link in the lower left-hand side of the page. Keep an eye out for more fun announcements with this feature! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more next week. Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Advanced sorting in Google spreadsheets

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Google Apps highlights – 6/4/2010 Posted: 04 Jun 2010 08:00 AM PDT This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Over the last couple of weeks we continued to improve the new versions of Google documents and spreadsheets, introduced some features to Gmail and made it easier for businesses and schools to switch to Google Apps. Advanced sorting in Google spreadsheets We added some powerful data sorting controls to the new version of Google spreadsheets. Rather than sorting an entire worksheet by values in a single column, you can now sort any range of cells and sort by the contents of multiple columns. Formula highlighting in Google spreadsheets We also made it easier to write formulas in the new version of Google spreadsheets by adding visual indicators to show which cells a particular formula references. These color-coded highlights will help you keep track of your formulas at a glance. This feature works with Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; Firefox support is coming soon. Improvements to Google documents The new version of Google documents also got a few upgrades last week, including improvements to make finding content in your documents, applying text styles and linking to sections within your documents with bookmarks faster and easier. "Move Icon Column" now in Gmail Labs Our set of experimental Gmail features has a new addition: the "Move Icon Column" Lab. This Labs feature moves the icons for messages with attachments, chats and calendar invitations from the right side of your inbox to the left, keeping those icons next to your stars. You can enable this feature and many others from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings. "Reshare" in Google Buzz As of last week, Google Buzz lets you reshare posts that you find interesting without having to copy and paste the original content. Just click the new "Reshare" link beneath public buzz posts, type up anything you want to add and click "Post." You can choose to reshare publicly on the web or privately to a select group. Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® We offer an array of migration tools to help businesses and schools move email, calendar and contacts data from their old systems to Google's cloud. Customers have used these utilities to migrate more than 2 billion email messages to Google's cloud, and last week we introduced the new Google Apps Migration tool for Microsoft Outlook®. This is a new end-user tool that moves email, calendar and contact data from Outlook® profiles, PST files and Exchange accounts to Google Apps. Who's gone Google? In the spirit of National Small Business Week, we recently profiled a few small businesses doing big things with Google Apps. Revenue Spark is using Google Apps to build up a global presence to help bring green technology products to market. Yola counts on Google Apps to help their business grow fluidly as they bring on more software developers and business employees around the world. Smart Furniture turned to Google Apps to free up precious resources, improve productivity and remove barriers to growth. These are just a few of the millions of businesses that have gone Google. If your company has a story to share, add yourself to the map! We continue to see more and more schools beginning to use Google Apps as well. A warm welcome to Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, SUNY Oswego, Elon University, Anderson University and Oxford Brookes University. Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager