Archive for May, 2006

Posted by Pam Saenger, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Library Outreach

When we announced the launch of Google Book Search (then called Google Print), we were bowled over by how many people wrote to tell us how excited they were about Google working to make the world's books searchable online. One of the most memorable emails came from Laura Moody, a librarian at the Gulf Shores Public Library in Alabama. She wrote:

I admire a company that is so in line with the premise of library ideals. The dissemination of knowledge, especially the scanning in of the university collections and making them available to all in the WORLD, is truly noble. You are not just working at a job. You will enable, in a strange way, the remaining doors of ignorance to be blasted away. You will allow those people who are still isolated from the rest of the world to experience the light of knowledge. Remain true to your vision. Go home at the end of the day with a sigh of well-earned satisfaction. Some people talk about changing the world. You are actually doing it.

On top of making our day (week? month? year?), this email prompted us to think more deeply about how similar Google's mission is to a librarian's, and to explore ways we can work more closely with librarians in the quest to connect people and information.

Since then, we've launched the Google Librarian Center, a new resource center for librarians. While we're still in the early stages of the project and there's plenty more to come, we recently released our first teaching tool: a downloadable "cheat sheet" poster providing web search tips for librarians and their patrons. We also posted the archives of the Google Librarian Newsletter, which by our last count reaches nearly 30,000 librarians all around the world. So far in the newsletter, we've answered common questions librarians ask us about Google tools, including "How does Google rank search results?" and "How does Google Earth work?" Then we passed the baton to librarians, asking Karen Schneider of the Librarians' Internet Index (LII) how she makes sense of search results. And in the next issue, scheduled for release at the end of June, we'll focus for the first time on Google Book Search.

If you're a librarian, a book lover or just curious about how to get the most out of Google tools, we invite you to visit the website and sign up for the Google Librarian Newsletter. You can join the newsletter group and receive the next issue by entering your email address here.

We recognize the need to leverage the vertical and technical expertise of 3rd parties in extending the reach of search deeper into corporate networks. As a result the Google Enterprise Professional partner program has grown tremendously since its inception. Its a no brainer for the partner as they get to market and sell value added services and solutions they've integrated with the Google Search Appliance. And Google gets to provide its users with great search access to a broader set of enterprise information. Win-win.

Less brouhaha, however, is made of a more subtle phenomena that we're starting to notice. For our partners, adding the power of a Google Search Appliance to a solution or product can provide fast and relevant search, but it can also uncover new challenges and customer requirements as the scope of their customer relationship expands. This can lead to new opportunities where the partner can certainly choose to increase their footprint. In many cases, however, this results in our partners talking to each other and we're seeing them leverage each other's services and form complementary relationships where they can go in together and provide a more complete interdependent solution for their collective customers. There's the portal solution provider who seeks help from a security services firm to deal with new access control requirements on previously unsearchable restricted document stores. And the professional services firm who, while deploying a custom user interface for a search appliance, joins forces with a software vendor who's created an appliance connector for the customer's legacy system. There's the systems integrator who cooperates with the business intelligence vendor to help their customer realize the benefits of a single interface for information access and decision making.

In many cases the Google Search Appliance provides the interface that brings together disparate systems and business applications that would never have otherwise worked together. Now we're bringing together partner solution providers, application vendors, and integrators who would never have otherwise worked together. We're happy to make the world a more cooperative place, and its a nice side effect that this teamwork ultimately results in an improved user experience.

The Live Local team shipped a major update this week with a bunch of new unique features. Coverage in blogs and other online sites has been really positive, but they all seem to focus on the same couple of features. We wanted to spotlight some of the other goodies that are often overlooked, while also providing tips for the big ticket features that might not be obvious.

International Coverage

Until now, International support in Live Local has been thin, focusing on North America. Not any more! With this release we introduced maps all over the world, street address lookups in nearly 30 Countries and driving directions in places you’ve probably never heard of. You can just as easily get one in Budapest.  Also new in this release, we have begun rolling out super high-res aerial and birds eye imagery that you won’t find anywhere else online. The UK is the first area covered, but as promised we’ll just keep rolling out the imagery over the coming weeks. The Google Earth Blog has a good look at this feature and how it stacks up to competing offerings.

Live Messenger Integration

Probably one of the most useful features we’ve ever popped out. This lets you and a friend on your Messenger contact list navigate a single shared map! If you’ve ever tried to help a friend pick a hotel in a new city via phone or try to agree on a place to meet to throw a Frisbee, this is your feature. You initiate the Messenger conversation from within Live Local – Use the ‘Share -> Share in Messenger’ menu (just above the map) to display your Messenger Contact list. Choose a contact and they will be alerted to accept your invite. When they do, a conversation window will open with your map loaded from Live Local. When you drag the map, it updates on their display as well. If your friend does a search for Thai Restaurants, you both see the results. If you right click on the map to add a custom pushpin, it is displayed for both of you. Give it a try! Works in MSN Messenger 6.0 or higher including Live Messenger.

Microsoft Outlook Integration

Coinciding with the launch this week, a free Windows Live Local plugin for Microsoft Outlook hit the streets that integrates maps and driving directions into your calendar items and appointments. The must have feature here is the automatic buffering of a meeting’s reminder based on estimated travel time!

Traffic

Lots of coverage has focused on Live Local being the first major mapping site to offer traffic flow data drawn right on the streets as an overlay. Slick indeed, but when you add a layer of real-time Traffic Cameras for a region, you suddenly have an indispensable tool that you’ll bookmark and use everyday. Check to see if a traffic cam Collection already exists for your city and if not why not be the first to create it. Your entire city will thank you!

Collections and Live Favorites

Collections are just what they sound like – a grouping of stuff on your Scratchpad that you want to save together. From a list of restaurant recommendations that your friends have told you about, to a Collection of your best hikes in Italy. Collections are easy to create and share, and with the integration we’ve added for Live Favorites, it’s also easy to keep track of Collections sent to you by friends that you want to recall later. Lets say they send you this Collection of Beach videos from TurnHere.com. In the viewer is an ‘Add to Favorites’ link that will add a permalink for the Collection to your live Favorites. You can then view all of your faves from within Live Local by going to the ‘Collections -> Favorites’ menu.

As you can see, we packed a lot into this release.  Give it a try and let us know what you think. Your feedback will shape the next release, just as it has these past three. And for the coders reading this, all of the details of the latest map control and API can be found on Alex Daley’s blog so you can get started building all of this goodness into your own applications..

---Chandu Thota, Steve Lombardi and the entire Virtual Earth Team