That’s why we’re announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We’ll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

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This weekend, there has been a lot of discussion about our imagery of New Orleans in Google Maps and Google Earth. I thought I’d give you some background that may clear things up, and also let you know about new imagery of the region now available.

In 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, a very motivated group of volunteers at Google worked with NOAA, NASA, and others to post updated imagery of the affected areas in Google Maps and Google Earth as quickly as possible. This data served as a useful reference for many people — from those interested in understanding what had happened, to friends and families checking on the status of loved ones and property, to rescuers and relief workers. Shortly after the event, we received a voicemail thanking us for the role Google Earth played in guiding rescuers to stranded victims.

Several months later, in September 2006, the storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements. We continued to make available the Katrina imagery, and associated overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters, on a dedicated site (earth.google.com/katrina.html). Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality — accounting for timeliness, resolution, cloud cover, light conditions, and color balancing.

Given that the changes that affected New Orleans happened many months ago, we were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments. Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we’re happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing. That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening.

Make no mistake, this wasn’t any effort on our part to rewrite history. But it looks like this April Fool’s joke was on us.

Fortunately, my feeling of guilt is coming to an end. When we released the Google Notebook in its shiny, fresh new look, we also made it speak 17 other languages besides English. We have German, Polish, Turkish—to name a few—and of course Chinese. Admittedly, there is still a long way to go for us to reach everyone in the world in all the thousands of languages. Rest assured, though, that just because your language isn’t one of the first doesn’t mean that we have forgotten you.

In case you haven’t heard about it before, Google Notebook lets you conveniently collect, organize and share information while searching and browsing the web. If you’ve tried it already, I urge you to try again, as its new interface is much smoother to use than it was—and I’m not saying that just because I’m looking at it in Chinese.

Original Post

Time warp—now it’s 2007. Games can be played anywhere and at anytime. In this mobile world, games have evolved to become a part of our lives. Unlike television, gamers can make games their own—customizing their experience in new ways—and we are helping them do that big time.

But of course developing these sophisticated games can be very expensive. Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.

Our charge at Adscape has always been to honor the game that was developed and find new ways to enable that game to continue so others can enjoy it. That’s why we are so stoked to join Google—because these guys get it, and are committed to helping us continue our mission.

originally posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games

IBM and Yahoo have teamed up to bring geeks and conspiracy buffs around the world UFO Crawler, which is a micro-level search engine designed to bring up only information related to UFOs, ghosts, the unexplained, and creepy things that go bump in the night.

Vid Look Up is a custom search engine via Google that will find the hosted video you are looking for. Whether it is on YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, or dozens of other free video sharing sites, this bugger will find it for you.

If you are planning on taking a trip to Europe, hostels can offer an affordable place to stay. This new search engine cuts right to the chase, and will help you find the best rates and comparisons.

We have a system that can learn to translate better if we know where the problems are. In the past, there was no way to tell us about problem translations. Now there is. Next time you see a sentence that makes you go “hmmm,” just hover over it to display the original text tooltip and click the “Suggest a better translation” link. Tell us what it should have said, and we’ll use your suggestion to improve translation quality in future updates to our service.

This feature is available when you use one of the language translation pairs developed by our research group:

English to/from Arabic
English to/from Chinese (Simplified/Traditional)
English to/from Russian
Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)
So the next time you can think of a better translation, be sure to use this new interface and share your wisdom! That way, everyone will benefit from it.

Moscow-based search engine Quintura will relaunch its visual search engine with a new user interface.

The company, which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype, AllPeers, Piczo, Nimbuzz) and OpenView Venture Partners, has developed technology that clusters related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as a tag cloud. Users can refine their searches by clicking on any word in the cloud - words that are closer and bigger than other words are more correlated to the initial query than other terms. Mousing over any word in the cloud shows related terms to that as well.

The company wisely moved away from a downloadable search application last year to a pure online service. The new interface moves the tag cloud to the left and search results to the right - previously the search results were below the cloud and seemed somewhat crowded.The site also has decent image and video search, and child-safe search.

So first there was Gmail for your domain — a limited service that helped organizations like San Jose City College offer personalized Gmail inboxes to all their users. As our little guy picked up new skills (Calendar, Talk, and Page Creator) it grew out of its old name and into Google Apps for Your Domain.

A quick learner, by October Google Apps had perfected 17 more languages, so we could help bring our communication tools all around the globe. Later in the fall, we improved our organizational skills with the Start Page, which brought all the Apps together into a centralized place. Then it was time to start school. Google Apps entered Arizona State University and stood out as one of those high achievers. Today, students and administrators at large universities like ASU and Lakehead are raving about Apps — how it saves money and IT resources, plus make students lives easier with bigger spam-free mailboxes and a set of tools for working together.

Now, I’m excited to tell you that our baby has finally graduated and is entering the business world. Google Apps Premier Edition is a new version designed to take on all the challenges presented by businesses with complex IT needs. For $50 per account per year, you get the whole Google Apps package plus many new business-oriented features, including access to our APIs and partner solutions (so it’s easy to integrate with existing systems), conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of inbox storage, extended business hours phone support, and mobile access to your email on BlackBerry devices (just in case you can’t get enough at the office).

Already, companies big and small, like Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, Prudential, and SF Bay Pediatrics, are talking about how this new version of Google Apps makes it easy to offer low-cost communication and collaboration tools to all their employees so they can get on with what they do best.

Google Apps also won’t forget its roots anytime soon. The Standard and Education Editions will continue to be offered for free, and we’ll keep working on all three flavors of Google Apps with the help of feedback from all of you. As a start, we’ve just integrated Google Docs & Spreadsheets in all three editions so that everyone can share and edit documents online. Since August, we’ve also added five more major features you’ve requested, including customized service URLs (mail.yourcompany.com) and domain registration for organizations that don’t yet have a custom domain. Our appearance has matured too, with updates to the administrator control panel that make it easier to setup and manage your services.