Your mobile and desktop search history now in sync

Sometimes I do a search on my desktop computer, only to find that I need to repeat the same search again later on my mobile phone. Today in the US we're launching Personalized Suggest for Android, iPhone and Palm WebOS, which makes it really easy to repeat your past searches on the go. For example, suppose that before I depart for the airport, I quickly check my flight status by searching for "american airlines 19" using google.com on my computer. Later, as I am hailing a taxi in rush hour traffic, I can open google.com on my phone, click in the search box, and choose "american airlines 19" from the list of search suggestions!

To try this yourself, make sure that you are signed-in to the same Google Account on your computer and on your phone when searching. In addition, Web History needs to be enabled for your Google Account. Mobile users can turn on/off history by selecting "Save searches" or "Do not save searches" under Settings on google.com.

Posted by Toshi Tajima, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team

Introducing the new Local Search for Mobile

The mobile search team is always looking for new ways to make searching the world around you as easy and useful as searching the web. Today we're introducing a redesigned local search experience on your phone that integrates with Google Maps on your computer and includes browseable categories that let you search without typing. Let me tell you how I used these features on my recent vacation to Hawaii.

Before I left, I researched places to visit on Google Maps. I signed in to my Google account and starred the places I wanted to go. Once I got to Hawaii, by signing in on my phone, I was able to see the places I starred on desktop Maps under "Starred Places". I could then click through on place names to visit mobile-optimized versions of Place Pages for Google Maps that include opening hours, reviews, photos, and more.


The new category browse feature made it easy to find a place to rent bicycles for a quick tour of the coastline. I just tapped on "Entertainment & Recreation" and then "Bicycles" to execute a search — no typing necessary. When it was time for scuba diving, I didn't see an appropriate category, so I started typing "SCUBA" in the search box and clicked on a suggestion for "Scuba Tour Agency". A few hours later, I was petting a white-tipped reef shark!

Of course, local search isn't only useful when you're traveling — here's an example of planning a birthday party in my hometown, San Francisco:



To access these features on your mobile device, go to www.google.com/m/local, or just click on the Local tab on www.google.com. The product is available in the US and China, with more regions coming soon.

Posted by Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Mobile Local Search Team

The Iterative Web App: 'Move' and 'Enhanced Refresh'

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: 'Move' and 'Enhanced Refresh.'

Last week we released two new features which can save you clicks when using web-based Gmail on an iPhone or Android-powered device.

The first one is 'Move', which you can find under 'More' in the Floaty Bar. The 'Move' function lets you label and archive a message in a single step. So as soon as you 'move' a conversation to a certain label, that email will disappear from your Inbox and show up under that label. We introduced this feature to Gmail for your PC earlier this year, and now we're making it available for your mobile phone as well.

Another improvement we made is 'Enhanced Refresh.' With this feature, your Gmail inbox auto-refreshes when you switch back to Gmail from another tab or application. And if your phone goes to sleep while Gmail is open, it will refresh when you wake it up.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available in US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.


by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

Google Mobile App for Windows Mobile gets My Location and more

It's easier and faster than ever to search Google using your Windows Mobile phone. Just visit m.google.com to download the latest version of Google Mobile App, which includes these new features:

• My Location. Get local results without typing your location. Once you see the blue My Location dot with your current location below the search box, simply search for a local query, for example "italian restaurant", and the search results will contain local business results along with web results.
  
  To protect your privacy, location is encrypted when sent to the server, and only your most recent location is stored so that successive searches can use the same location. You can disable My Location at any time in the "Advanced Options" screen.
  
• Google Suggest. Reduce typing time by selecting suggestions to complete your queries. You will also see URL suggestions, which bring you directly to a web page, skipping the search results page entirely. Try typing "facebook" to see this kind of suggestion.
  
• Search with Maps. If you have installed Google Maps, type a local query and wait for suggestions. Select the suggestion with the red pin next to it to launch your search inside Google Maps.

To download the new version of Google Mobile App, visit m.google.com from your phone.

Posted by Craig Wilkinson, Software Engineer

Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support

Earlier this year, we launched Google Sync which allows you to synchronize your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with your iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 devices. Today, we're adding Gmail support to Google Sync for iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile devices.

Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone. Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Sync works with your phone's native email application so there's no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.


To try Google Sync, visit m.google.com/sync from your computer. If you're already using Google Sync, learn how to enable Gmail sync. Since push Gmail has been a popular request on our Product Ideas page and Help Forum, we look forward to hearing your feedback, so drop us a line and let us know how it's working or what you'd like to see next.

Douglas Gresham, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

Update at 8:20am: We jumped the gun on this post. The new feature should be rolling out in a few minutes.

Google Fast Flip for Android and iPhone

Browsing print and online articles on a phone can often be a slow task. There are many different sites to visit, and media-rich pages can take a long time to load. Of course, mobile devices make this more difficult with small screens, slower Internet connections, and less comfortable keyboards.

To help solve this problem, today we announced a new product from Google Labs: Google Fast Flip for computers, iPhone, and Android-powered devices. Google Fast Flip combines some of the best features of reading articles in print and on the web.

With this webapp you can literally flip through stories with the swipe of your finger. To get more information or view the entire article, simply tap on the screen. You can browse headlines and popular articles, and view trending topics. Searching for a specific topic lets you make your own "magazine." Fast Flip makes sharing articles easy as well. To send an article to someone, simply tap on the "Email" link in the upper right.

To try it out, point your mobile browser to fastflip.googlelabs.com. For easy access, we recommend creating a home screen link or bookmark. Fast Flip works on all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android-powered devices. For more information on Google Fast Flip, check out our post on the Official Google Blog.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

Google Search results optimized for feature phones in Arabic and Hebrew -- 40 languages now supported

Forty-language support is an important milestone for a product at Google. We are very excited that by adding support for Hebrew and Arabic, our new optimized mobile Search experience is now available in 40 languages for feature phones.

We launched in 38 left-to-right languages in July, bringing the comprehensiveness of Google's web search to mobile users around the world. Now Arabic and Hebrew speakers will also be able to benefit from universal search results on their mobile devices.

As a reminder, the new search results format provides more complete support for the universal search results you're familiar with on your computer. This means that News, Image, Blog, Video and Product Search results blend right into your results pages when available and relevant to your query. Also, many of your favorite Google Search features now appear in the first result in order to provide direct answers to your searches.



Posted by Zhen Wang, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team

The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. It is cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed.

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).

We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps.

YouTube Mobile App Expands to Five New Languages

We're happy to announce that the YouTube Mobile Application for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 devices is now available in five new languages. We now support users with localized content in Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Czech. This brings the total number of languages the app supports to 12.

YouTube's Mobile Application makes it easy to quickly load and watch high-quality YouTube videos on your mobile phone, even in weak coverage areas. To get the update or to try the app for the first time, simply visit m.youtube.com/app in your phone's browser.

We'd love to get your feedback, so visit our forum if you have questions or want to chat about YouTube mobile.

Posted by Robin Norvell, Mobile Consumer Operations

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server now available

If you have a corporate BlackBerry smartphone, you might be interested to know that the Google Apps team has just made the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server available for download. This connector makes it possible to use Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts with corporate BlackBerry phones' built-in applications.

If you manage IT for your organization, you'll want to read the Enterprise team's blog post that details the Google Apps Connector.

If you don't manage IT but you want your company to adopt Google Apps and the Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, tell your IT team that it's time to "Go Google".

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Apps Marketing Manager

"Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens."

Today we're pleased to announce a new Google Labs application for Android-powered devices in the US called, Listen. Listen quickly finds podcasts and web audio relevant to your searches, lets you stream over-the-air or download for later, and subscribe to fresh content from your favorite feeds and searches. In short, Listen helps organize the world of audio information and makes it easily accessible anytime, anywhere. And if you agree with the Jimi Hendrix quote that is the title of this post, then Listen may actually make you wiser, too.

Listen lets you stay informed even while engaged in other activities. Our colleagues use Listen as a personal audio-magazine while exercising, commuting, gardening, cleaning, dressing, cooking, and more*.



It's simple to get started. Just go to Android Market on your Android-powered device and search for "Listen". Install the application and search for anything you would like to listen to. For inspiration, try hitting "Popular searches" from the home screen. This will show some of the fastest-rising audio searches that people are making now. Tapping one of the results reveals content that you can play, queue for later, or subscribe to.

So search for, subscribe to, sit back and listen to thousands of podcasts from your phone. Remember that this is a Labs launch, so we are particularly eager to get your thoughts and feedback below. For more information, take a look at our Google Labs page.

Posted by Bill Schilit and Sam Roweis, Research Scientists

*driving, shopping, eating, farming, laundering, shaving, vacuuming or hoovering, traveling, waiting, toileting, mowing, remodeling, grooming, collecting, raking, swimming, refinishing, painting, sewing, hiking, walking, resting, jogging, loafing, pet sitting, ice fishing, packing, paving, digging, sweeping, recuperating, cementing, guarding, waking, darning, watering, watching, inspecting, moving, envelope stuffing, constructing, mending, baking, scrap booking, jack hammering, mopping, maple sugaring, patrolling, demolishing, horse grooming, ironing, biking, dog walking, ranching, restocking, fishing, sanding, polishing, and mailing.

New Image Search Results for Feature Phones

Earlier this year, we launched new Image Search results for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Since then, we've rolled out the new format to iPhone and Android in 28 countries. Now, the new Image Search results pages are also available for most other phones in 38 languages.

The image results are tightly packed, making optimal use of the screen space on your phone and allowing you to scan eight to fourteen images on a single results page. Clicking an image leads to a details page, which not only shows a larger thumbnail, but also lets you either visit the web page hosting the image or view the image itself in full size. Moreover you can navigate the search results using "next" and "previous" links. These features are designed to make browsing and searching for images on your phone easier and faster.

How to use Image Search:
1. Go to google.com and click on “Images.”
2. Do a search query. The results page shows related images, clicking on an image loads the details page.

3. The image details page shows a larger thumbnail and links to the original website and image. You could also navigate to other results using "Next Image" link.

Posted by Varun Sharma and Jignashu Parikh, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

The Iterative Web App: Outbox for Emails in Limbo

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Outbox.

With the web-browser-based Gmail for mobile we launched in April for iPhone and Android-powered devices, you can compose mail even when you're offline. That means you can write an email when there's no wireless connection, like in a subway or an airplane. And when you hit send, the message will be sent when the phone's network connectivity gets re-established. But what if you'd like to view the message that you just "sent" while still offline? Where can you find those 'sent but not actually sent' emails? Before today, the answer was "nowhere."

To solve this problem, we're now introducing a new feature, called Outbox. Outbox is a new label that appears in the menu when you have queued messages stuck on your phone and presents a read-only view of the subject of those messages. So if you want to make sure the previous message was sent before writing a follow-up mail, you can go ahead and find it in Outbox. Please note that you can read only the subject, not the body, of messages in Outbox.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

We're Listening

Here at Google, user feedback helps us improve our products. While we love to hear praise on what's working well, the honest direct feedback on what's not working is just as valuable and motivating. We'd like to share a couple of stories about recent product changes that were shaped greatly based on the feedback you have provided in the Google Mobile Help Forum. Hopefully, you'll continue to raise your voice and help us build better and more useful products.

iGoogle for Android and iPhone

In January, the high-end version of iGoogle for Android was discontinued because we felt it was too slow, and users were, instead, redirected to the standard Mobile iGoogle site. At the time, we thought you'd welcome the improvements to speed and stability. We humbly found out that we were wrong. One thread in the user forum received over 350 replies and almost 18,000 page views! Here's what some folks had to say:

"Its not just that the standard mobile verision of iGoogle is weak, its vastly inferior to the optimized version for iPhone..." - mccarrabba


"The mobile version is not good enough. Why should I have to suffer because other mobile devices offer crappy browsers? This is a horribly short-sighted decision." - tewha

Well, we heard you loud and clear. Our team read each of the forum posts, and listened to why the standard version did not meet your needs. Last month, we brought back iGoogle for Android and iPhone and made it better than ever. The new version is faster and easier to use, and there's support for tabs and more of your favorite gadgets. We also now support the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets, so you can read article summaries without leaving the page.

We're glad that so many of you voiced your ideas. iGoogle is back and better, and it seems like folks are pretty stoked:

"Personally, I could have cried. And I mean that in a good way. OMG-about time!! I'm leaving on vacation and was for sure I was going to have to take my laptop. Tabs actually work! My gadgets work! Its back! Hip Hip Hooray!" - ktigger2

Google Maps for mobile
Soon after we launched Google Maps for mobile 3.0 and Google Latitude on four platforms (Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian S60), we received some helpful feedback on where improvements could be made and problems fixed.

Keeping in mind the input of many faithful Help Forum posters, we released two updated versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 users in April (version 3.0.1) and July (version 3.2). These versions added new features, like Layers, and included some fixes and new ways to use Maps for mobile that were among the most requested by you. For example, the My Maps feature request received over 2,000 votes on our Mobile Product Ideas page. We also used specific Help Forum conversations to tweak behavior, such as the backlight timeout on Symbian phones, and to fix issues, like copy and paste for Windows Mobile phones.

In June, we also updated Maps in Android Market to Maps 3.1, introducing popular feature requests like Transit directions and Google Search by voice. We've received lots of positive feedback about pushing out these features:

"Not only is this an awesome update, but what an awesome way to distribute!" - matt

In addition to the iGoogle and Maps for mobile updates, your feedback also led to the development of other exciting new features -- for example, labels for Gmail and direct YouTube uploads on Android. Your ideas and requests help us to drive and prioritize new products and features, so please post your thoughts on the Help Forum. As you continue to show us what you care about, we'll continue to listen as we work on our mobile products.




Posted by Chris Nguyen & Gabe Garcia, Google Mobile Consumer Operations

The Iterative Web App: Links Got Shorter and Smarter

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Smart Links.

We all know that on a mobile device, screen space is scarce, so it's not very helpful when I get an email with a long link such as this Google Maps link:



Not only is the link taking up an unnecessarily large amount of space, but it's not easy to find the address that's hidden in the middle of the link. To solve this problem, we now shorten the link and automatically convert raw links into named links, which we call "Smart Links". So instead of seeing that long link to Google Maps, you're going to see the link renamed to the actual address:

Clicking on it still takes you to the same Google Maps page, but now the link is much shorter and the important information is more visible!

Here's a list of links we currently support:

• Google Maps address queries
• Google Maps directional queries (with one destination)
• Google Sites webpages
• YouTube videos
  

We're planning to roll out support for more link types, such as Google Docs, so watch for those in your emails. Please note that Smart Links work only in plaintext emails right now.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

One more tip: Label management got easier for Android-powered devices with a physical keyboard. In the "Label as..." menu on the floaty bar, there is now a text box above the list of labels. You can type the name of a label you wish to select into the box rather than clicking on it. As you type, the list filters to show only labels that match what you've typed. We also added more keyboard shortcuts to bring it closer to the Gmail experience on your computer.


Posted by Casey Ho, Software Engineer, Google Mobile